By Victoria Aveyard
If there’s one thing Mare Barrow knows, it’s that she’s different.
Mare Barrow’s blood is red—the color of common folk—but her Silver ability, the power to control lightning, has turned her into a weapon that the royal court tries to control.
The crown calls her an impossibility, a fake, but as she makes her escape from Maven, the prince—the friend—who betrayed her, Mare uncovers something startling: she is not the only one of her kind.
Pursued by Maven, now a vindictive king, Mare sets out to find and recruit other Red-and-Silver fighters to join in the struggle against her oppressors.
But Mare finds herself on a deadly path, at risk of becoming exactly the kind of monster she is trying to defeat.
Will she shatter under the weight of the lives that are the cost of rebellion? Or have treachery and betrayal hardened her forever?
The electrifying next installment in the Red Queen series escalates the struggle between the growing rebel army and the blood-segregated world they’ve always known—and pits Mare against the darkness that has grown in her soul.
The second book is really where the overtures of The X-Men come through in this series. Mare and her friends are looking for more New Bloods which means we’re exposed to a host of fun new powers. Once these New Bloods are collected, they obviously move into a training phase to prepare for the coming war.
If you didn’t like Mare in book one, you won’t like her here. Much as in all second books, the hero has to make some questionable choices and do questionable things, from which they’ll need to reassert themselves for the third book so we love them by series end.
There is a major death in this book, but it didn’t really sadden me. I think others felt differently though.
All in all, looking forward to book three!
