A Sleight of Shadows
Sep. 28th, 2025 07:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearA Sleight of Shadows by Kat Howard is the sequel to An Unkindness of Magicians and picks up almost exactly where that book left off. It charts the repercussions of the events of the first book on the Unseen World of magicians, with a lot of people unhappy with the situation and wanting to put things back to the way they were. So it's about privilege and resistance to change and principles being challenged by personal inconvenience. Which is what the first one was about. And that's kind of the problem - since the first book could easily work as a standalone, and this one feels more like an extended coda than a story in and of itself and doesn't really go anywhere particularly interesting.
I enjoyed spending more time with these characters and in this world to a certain extent. But some of it was pretty icky and some of it was very sad.
I wasn't overly keen on the audiobook narrator - she told the story perfectly well, so that's not a criticism of her performance, it just didn't really work for me for various reasons.
Anyway, good to have completed this series - but I'm just not sure what purpose this second books really serves.
I enjoyed spending more time with these characters and in this world to a certain extent. But some of it was pretty icky and some of it was very sad.
I wasn't overly keen on the audiobook narrator - she told the story perfectly well, so that's not a criticism of her performance, it just didn't really work for me for various reasons.
Anyway, good to have completed this series - but I'm just not sure what purpose this second books really serves.
