Kirsten Love

Used the Dracula daily and it was even better in many ways to reading it as originally written because it was sent on the day. Could feel passage of time.

I wasn't in a place to enjoy the slow reading to appreciate the prose and references.

A different kind of hero and more realistic hero. I found the audio book really difficult to keep track of names.

The characters from the first book became somewhat less likable in this one, but it was the random and glaring worldbuilding that was aggravating and kept throwing me out of the story. There may be spoilers, but most of the plot points are on the back of the book. One of the major premises of the story is that the villain is the brilliant leader of a faction of scientific/observant individuals. They are guarding by a group trained specifically for battle and fighting. And everyone is color coded. Most of the book plot is with the plan to storm the villain's headquarters and the dangers. Yet, our heroine wears the ‘wrong' colors, walks right up the street in daylight, through the unlocked and unguarded doors, through a lobby of supposedly observant people and checks in a the front desk. Who even has a front desk check in during a war??

Many fantasy series don't include real consequences or real reactions- this book defies that with the consequences of the 1st. And it still feels organic in how the plot and characters react to everything. I rarely get surprised by how characters change and this book did...