Sian's Reviews > Storm & Shield

3 stars. I ended up slightly disappointed at the sequel.

The start was exciting and I overall enjoyed the back and forth from Bashir and Aysel in the beginning, but then the romance happened very suddenly without much build up and overtook the plot for the rest of the book. In fact, the politics and the war was very much put on the back burner, something that I was greatly excited for from book one. So much so that one plot line surrounding the Vizier was completely abandoned?
Who was supposed to be one of the big villains of this saga?

The dynamics between Bashir and Aysel turned quite boring quite quickly, I didn’t feel they had much development or chemistry in comparison to Naime and Makram from the first book, they felt slightly shallower, less flawed, and more inconsistent in their characterisation.

Also did you know that Aysel was a very small teeny gal? I never would have guessed it it wasn’t mentioned every page.

However, the prose was still good and I definitely enjoyed the first 30-40%. Unfortunately I ended up skim reading the last 20%, because nothing of importance really happened. Sad because I loved the first book SO much