I wanted to rate this at least a 2 since I loved Strange the Dreamer so much but I really hated this book. I don't know how such a good story could be ruined to this extent. "It sounded just as he'd always imagined it would: like calligraphy, if calligraphy were written in honey." That's the kind of beautiful writing and imagery you can expect from the first book. This book unfortunately reads like someone read Strange the Dreamer and wanted more so they wrote really bad fanfic. I can't believe they were written by the same person. I didn't recognize any of the characters and the magic is gone from the story. I have a lot of issues with this book but here are some of the big ones that are really irritating me:

Characters - most are barely mentioned and no one is developed any further. Even the people who had complex stories around them are reduced to one-dimensional characters.

Nauseating romantic relationships - Lazlo and Sarai are very much in love. You know that because they tell you all the time. And then you have the very irritating Ferral/Ruby thing. But it isn't just the young people who are irritating - what about Eril-Fane and Azareen? Their relationship development makes no sense at all.

Lazlo's origin story - well that was confusing. I thought this had a chance to be interesting when Cora and Nova were brought into the story but it was mostly convoluted.

And of course we need lots of rapey gods.

The thing that bugged me the most - why did Sarai die? Turns out living Sarai is exactly the same as ghost Sarai.

This book is terrible and really made me question my opinion of the first book. I wish I had never read this because anything that I could have made up for the future of this story would have been better than what I got.