The road trip went successfully yesterday, and while it was a tremendously long day– five hours of driving, half of it in the dark, is never fun for me– I do get to say for the first time in my life that my Thanksgiving dinner involved fresh squid-ink pasta, so that alone justified the entire trip.

I spent all day today reading this book here– the last 350 pages or so, to be exact– and while Iron Flame is significantly better than Fourth Wing in virtually every respect, I still feel like if I spend a lot of time talking about it, much like the first book, I will spend almost the entire review complaining and then tell you that I can’t wait for the next installment. I know, fundamentally, that that doesn’t make any sense, and yet it’s true.

The dialogue and the writing, in general, is much improved in this book over the previous one, but there are still a ton of decisions that Yarros makes throughout the course of the book that I just fundamentally don’t understand, and the worldbuilding still feels incoherent, but that’s due largely to the first book. Which maybe I should have reread? I dunno, but the main conflicts of the book still feel largely fuzzy to me in a way that I don’t think they should after eleven hundred pages of narrative, and one of the characters is kept as a gun on the wall for far too damn long and, to overextend the metaphor, when she is finally fired at the end of the book, I’m still not a hundred percent clear on how or why. I know that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense out of context, but I’m trying to not get into spoilery details here.

What this series does manage to do is be compelling enough that I don’t want to put it down, and Yarros excels at the sort of Dan Brown-esque one more chapter pacing that virtually guarantees that I’m going to rip through your book at maximum speed. I don’t care about the flaws at this point; I’m in for the next book, and when book three comes out I might go ahead and make the time to reread Fourth Wing and Iron Flame first so that I can definitely blame the book and not my own lack of reading comprehension/detail memory if something feels underbaked.

And again, much like the first book, if you’re reading all that and are unsure about whether I just told you to read this, well, yeah. I don’t know either.