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This is all frustrated by the course that the book takes. A full four fifths of the novel is spent bringing Lila and Kell together: each spends their time apart, and they’re brought slowly and inexorably together. While the two characters have trouble together, the book feels as though it’s been padded out by an extra hundred or so pages, none of which does much more than add atmosphere and some additional world building.

It’s a nice problem to have, because the scenery is great: but it still left me feeling that the book was spinning it’s wheels, biding its time before the real point of the story arrived in the last hundred or so pages.

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Even more frustratingly, I kept wondering how the narrative would be wrapped up in fifty, then forty, then thirty pages, before realizing that one of the major hooks - that Black London was rising again - wasn’t going to be resolved at all. The end result was something that left me thinking that the book was really just setup for a third, as-of-unnamed installment of the series.

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This is all well and good, because we get to see more adventures from Lila and Kell (and Schwab ends this book on one hell of a cliffhanger), but as a single volume, it’s not exactly a satisfying narrative.

This makes it sound like I hated the book: I didn’t. It’s a fine read, set in a really intriguing and interesting fantasy world, and I’m certainly planning on picking up the third book whenever it hits bookshelves. This is a series that is interesting, and most of all, fun to read, and A Gathering of Shadows delivers that in spades. I just wish that it felt a little less like a placeholder for what promises to be a really great adventure in the next book.

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A Gathering of Shadows will be published on February 23rd in hardcover, eBook and audio from Audible.