The Vanishing Throne (Falconer, #2)

by Elizabeth May

[ladygrey]

Aside from the odd font (I don’t think it’s Times New Roman, I think it’s like Courier and it was small and the italic words were something more stylized and still too small) this wasn’t a bad read. There was a lot of repetition- of moments from this book and moments from the last book and lines repeated again and again throughout the book. I think if you took out all the repetition it’d remove like a third of the book.

And there was a whole lot of scenic description. I know she was going for conveying the full force of destruction but I hadn’t visualized what Edinburgh the first time around. I didn’t need pages and pages of the destruction. Also, every single wound she gets leaves a scar. Like seriously, is that part of the Falconers curse that they scar every time they bleed?

And I didn’t love that the entire first quarter of the book Aileana was separated from the other characters. Those interactions make the story fun.

But then they’re all reunited (spoiler - I mean sorta - what fun would a story be that doesn’t include characters from the first book?). And the story is interesting enough. When the big “revelations” come they weren’t revolutionary but it was interesting to be immersed in them. The book lies. It says that truth is a monstrous thing. But its not. It’s cathartic and compelling and the best moment in the book, surprising or not.

The very end, actually, was unexpected sort of. It doesn’t really count that I saw it coming just before it happened. But it spun the story in what could be an interesting direction for the third book.