A Sky of Emerald Stars: A Novel

This is another great example of why A.K. Mulford has earned a spot on my "auto-buy" authors list. Their ability to weave complex fantasy world-building into a well-paced narrative is masterful. The amount of plot, character development, and context crammed into only 350ish pages is ✨️art.✨️ As with any book 2 in a series, there's a lot riding on both the narrative, and the new POV characters to be as compelling as the first book. In both ways, this one succeeds for me. While I will always be a Queen Calla fan, and I'm glad we get more of them with their wonderful mate Grae here, I found myself absolutely loving Sadie's journey too. And wow...there's a ✨️whole✨️ lot more about this world that we didn't know! Things are going to get very, very interesting in the final book of this trilogy. Be warned: the ending is intense. The plot twists are wickedly good, and devastating.

⭐️: 3.75/5 Format: 🎧 I am really, really down for the adventure cadence of this series. Sometimes I feel like books cram in too many scenes--like our ensemble has to deal with 30 unique events throughout the course of the book with no breathers or breaks--and sometimes far too few. While I do feel like the plot pacing had some issues (I was halfway in before some of those events started to really drive plot), I'm happy that the core goal laid out at the beginning of the book remained a connected thread throughout our heroes' adventures. Now, about those heroes. In this one I really liked Sadie and Navin as they are presented in this book. I will say that going from the first book to this one back-to-back, it was a little jarring, because while I know Calla may not have been the best narrator to show their personalities, Sadie and Navin were very different from how I felt they were characterized in the first book. When they started to show their personalities here, I was like, "are these the same characters?" That said, I really enjoyed them and their dynamic! I felt like for me personally, Sadie is more relatable than Calla is, so I liked her sections a lot. I also really liked their back and forth a lot. Because this book had Dual POV between Sadie and Calla, too, I got to learn to love more of the ensemble, while staying connected to the characters I already enjoyed. And we continued to explore gender expression and sexuality, which I thought was done really…

So far, absolutely loving this second book in the series. I am a little sad because I thought it would have art on the pages on the side, but it does not. This book reads a bit different, the chapters start with the characters name and that’s whose voice you are reading from. Unlike the first book. Still a good read so far, just bought the third book and excited to read it.