The Shining City

by Fiona Patton

Reviewed by Coral

Anavatan's enemies have united. Unless old enemies Brax, Spar and Graize can unite and stand together to aid the young god Hisar, the city will fall.

This series kind of fizzled in the end for me.

So much was spent building up this war but the actual war part didn't take up a whole lot page space. Most of it was spent on Spar, Braz, Graize and Hisar fighting in the dream/prophecy land.

Like I wrote in my review of book 1, I never really got pulled into the world of the books, which was disappointing as it had some interesting qualities to it.

I never really hated anyone in the book, so I wasn't really rooting for or against anyone in the battle. While I do like my stories to have more shades of gray to them, something just felt off about the whole thing. Like I was supposed to be rooting against someone, but that the characters weren't developed enough for me to know who to root against. I also didn't really understand the actions Panos took at the end.

The whole Brax-Graize showdown had been building for awhile and I wasn't really happy with how it played out. Most of it was a forced memory trip with very little actual talking between them. I was all for an eventual Braz and Graize hookup, but it just happened too fast without any real time spent resolving their issues.

Grade: C