A Crown of Talons Throne of Swans 2

It’s always a little bit scary and a little bit daunting picking up the finale in a duology when you adored the first book and rated it so highly. Firstly, there’s the fear that you won’t like it. That it will disappoint you and that disappointment will taint the first book for you. There’s a fear that your favourite characters won’t get the revenge they deserve, that their story will end on an unhappy note, that the world in which you loved in book one will feel different or unbalanced in the finale. There’s also excitement, so much excitement, to be delving back into a world that you adored so much. To me it’s like greeting characters like old friends and seeing how they’ve grown. A Throne of Swans is one of my favourite books and I was kindly gifted the second and final book, A Crown of Talons by the publisher @hotkeybooksya. What an emotional rollercoaster that was. Firstly, it’s such an amazing ability to ease your reader back into the world of a book they read a year ago without need for reintroduction. I was worried I would be confused and would end up needing to reread A Throne of Swans, but Katharine and Elizabeth Corr just lower you back into the story effortlessly with hints and refreshers so easily and I fell right back into step with the characters. Aron and Aderyn seemed so much more mature in this book, but I love that Aron still had his moments where he fell back into immaturity and his anger got the better of him. Altogether, I cried FOUR times during this book. Once with happiness and three times with HEARTBREAK and I’m not telling you which tears the ending resulted in, you’ll have to read it and find out! Phenomenally written and executed. Such a unique plot and an amazing fantasy book. It was dark, complex and tempting without being heavy and had the perfect balance of friendship and romance to balance out the parts that were heavy. An incredible book, I’d highly recommend this series to anyone.

I thought A Throne of Swans was a pretty promising opening novel for the book series. As someone who's Classically trained, I'm interested in reading about books that's inspired by musical pieces that I came across. I think A Throne of Swans was a clever and engaging Swan Lake retelling with animating characters and gorgeous backdrop. So I finally got around reading A Crown of Talons recently. While I enjoyed the beautiful backdrop as in the first novel, I felt that the plots are quite predictable (and fell prey to usual YA pitfalls) in the sequel so I didn't feel that engaged in this book. N.B. This book contains following content warnings: illnesses, blood mention, vomiting, violent death, and loss of loved ones (2.5 stars out of 5)

This was a really enjoyable duology, yes it had a few of the usual YA tropes and the romance mess sometimes got a bit much but overall I really liked it. It was an easy fun read and Aderyn was actually a very likable character even if she did do some very silly things sometimes. I loved the world building and would have liked more of that, it was great in this book when we were introduced to people from different lands and we saw how things could be better and worse. A solid 4 star read.