I received an eARC of this novel through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
This was one of my most anticipated books of the year, only below K. Ancrum’s Icarus, and I had loved Stars and Smoke, and Marie Lu’s books have all been 4 or 5 star reads for me for over a decade, so I fully anticipated loving its follow-up and getting another peek into Sydney and Winter’s worlds.
Instead, I found myself struggling to even get through this book. The spark felt like it was missing in this one, and I really only found myself finally feeling like I was reading one of Lu’s novels when we hit the last 10% which is not what I was at all expecting. The twist is visible from the very start, Sydney’s disability is nonexistent except for where it’s suddenly useful to mention to slow her down, and Winter’s team who had been a joy when they were present in book one are almost nonexistent too. I’m not sure that I’d give this one a reread and that absolutely breaks my heart.
Starts and Smoke had felt like pure joy, and it was clear that it had been written as a way to counter the amount of awful things going on in the world at the time of writing it, whereas Icon and Inferno tries to be more angsty and emotionally devastating, which is a common presence in Lu’s books but isn’t what I was expecting as the tone of the second book of a series that was initially created to be joyful and counter the negativity present in the everyday world. I had loved the initial concept for this series when Lu shared it, and I can’t lie that I’m disappointed in both the shortening of this series into a duology, or the major tonal shift that shortening seems to have brought.