My eyebrows are dangling from the ceiling.” For all of her independence and superpowers, Juliette never moves beyond her role as a pawn in someone else’s schemes. Overreliance on metaphor to express Juliette’s jaw-dropping surprise wears thin: “My mouth is sitting on my kneecaps. Fast-paced action scenes convey imminent danger vividly, but there’s little sense of a broader world here. The ending falls flat as the plot devolves into comic-book territory. But Adam belongs to a resistance movement he helps Juliette escape to their stronghold, where she finds that she’s not the only one with superhuman abilities. Unfortunately, he’s a soldier under orders from Warner, a power-hungry 19-year-old. Adam, it turns out, is immune to her deadly touch. After months of isolation, her captors suddenly give her a cellmate-Adam, a drop-dead gorgeous guy.

Juliette’s journal holds her tortured thoughts in an attempt to repress memories of the horrific act that landed her in a cell.

Juliette was torn from her home and thrown into an asylum by The Reestablishment, a militaristic regime in control since an environmental catastrophe left society in ruins. The resolution may be rather trite, but it’s hard to begrudge a safe harbor after such a stormy passage.įans of the first volume will be pleased with this duology closer.Ī dystopic thriller joins the crowded shelves but doesn't distinguish itself. The first-person narrative is so deeply immersed in Fable’s perpetually angry, desperately affection-starved perspective that it is a repeated shock to be reminded that those for whom she lies, cheats, and betrays are objectively horrible people-power-hungry criminals and stone-cold murderers-indistinguishable from the putative villains. Still, the poetic, sensual prose creates a richly imagined maritime world, grim and cruel but also occasionally wondrous, diverse in culture, class, and sexuality. While all this should be gripping, it too often fizzles into anticlimax. This sequel barely pauses for breath before plunging immediately into a convoluted plot dense with romance, political intrigue, seafaring adventure, double- and triple-crosses, and graphic, bloody violence. The only way out is to use her skill and magic to locate a legendary gemstone that may not even exist. But now she’s a prisoner, delivered across the sea to an even more ruthless adversary: her fabulously wealthy and powerful grandmother. A young woman unravels her hidden past and finds her true family and home in this sequel to Fable (2020).įable had believed that the treasure she salvaged for her crewmates would be enough to free them from her father, the sinister trader Saint.

Adrienne young fable series book 3