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Steadfast by Claudia Gray | website | facebook | twitter | instagram | Publisher/Year: Harper Teen | March 1, 2014 Pages: 384 Audiobook Publisher/Year: Blackstone Audiobooks | March 1st, 2014 Read By: Khristine Hvam Time: 9 hours 19 minutes Series: Spellcaster book 2 of 3 Genre: YA Urban Fantasy/Supernatural Format: Audiobook Source: Overdrive through Cincinnati Library |
Shannan’s Summary
After Halloween Nadia, Mateo, and Verlaine think they have succeeded at stopping Elizabeth, until a new evil magic starts affecting people. This only proves to Nadia how little she knows about magic and how much she needs help. But even with the help of a steadfast, good magic may not be enough.
First Off…
Loved the first story so of course I need to finish the series. Even if this is a second book.
Thoughts:
This one took me a while to get into. I think it has a lot to do with it being a second book, and I notoriously don’t get along with second books. As most second books tend to, this one had a lot of character development on the front end. By the last half to third though, the action started to pick up, and I was fully invested by the end.
This story has some great twists and turns that I didn’t see coming. As a reader, I love her mom’s story, which you find out in this book. I thought it made total sense to everything that’s happened and gives some great ideas for possibilities in the third book. I’ll be interested to see how the story wraps up. I can see a couple different possibilities and I’m not sure which route Grey will take it, or if it will even be an ending I can guess.
The Voice
Hvam continues to do a good job reading this series. It’s hard to believe that it’s the same person reading all the parts sometimes. It’s easy to settle back into the story and all the characters making this a pretty good series to listen too.
The Writing
What I appreciate with this book/series is rules don’t change or magically appear at just the right moment. It’s the general mystery and intrigue that keeps you reading. Some books like to change the rules or throw something new in that has never been mentioned before to mix things up. This is annoying. What Grey does well is giving the reader just enough information to know what is happening but withhold enough to make you want to keep reading. But even though you may not know everything, you know their are characters who do.
I think this method of mystery weaving can be difficult because, as an author, you have to figure out who knows what and when other characters need to know it, as well as letting the reader figure things out in a timely manner so they don’t get frustrated. It can be complicated, but this is a good book to examine to get a good idea of how to make it work. Especially when you are working with a set of “other world” rules such as magic.
In the End
I liked the book. Not as much as the first. But I feel like I’ll love the series in the end.
10 Second Summary:
- Heavy Character development: But it’s necessary. You get to know so much about all the characters and are more invested in the decisions they make as well as why they make them by the end.
- Slow Start: Because of the character development, but you’ll be hooked by the end.
- Some big questions answered: You get some of the big questions left from book one answered in this book, but more replace them. So there’s that…
This is probably a $5 or less book for me. But it’s because there seems to be no way around second books being heavy on the character development side, which I always struggle through. Pretty sure I’ll love the series though.