This is book 2 in the Ending Fire Trilogy. 
Book 1, The Final Strife, was easily a 5 star read for me so my hopes were very high coming into this book and boy where they fulfilled!

This book starts off exactly where the last one ended, building upon the fantastic and mysterious foundations book 1 had set up. Because I already felt highly attached to the characters thanks to the authors nuanced and enjoyable character work, this made book 2 all the more tense as now these characters have separated once again to follow different storylines, we wonder with the characters if they'll ever see one another again.

While the story premise itself seems cliché when boiled down to it's core elements, El-Arifi has managed to craft such a unique and compelling political drama within a complex and mysterious world. If you know anything about me, it's that I LOVE me a lost history / mysterious lost magic system. 

Without getting into spoilers (as I write this review to convince you to at least try book 1!) El-Arifi took some characters in such unique directions. I should have seen it coming thanks to book 1 out-of-the-box narrative, yet it still felt so natural and left me unsure on what was going to happen next. I love being challenged in our love for characters we KNOW are the good guys but maybe don't end up doing good things. 

The reason this isn't 5 stars is book 1 had a slight edge on this one. I can't quite put my finger on it but I think it wasn't as balanced as it could have been, especially switching between such major PoVs WITH time skips in-between. It's a massively ambitious series and I'm excited to see where book 3 goes.