Tuesday 21 August 2018

Teaser Tuesday: Ally by Anna Banks

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Ambrosia of The Purple Booker.
To play along just do the following:
  • Grab your current read
  • Open to a random page
  • Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
  • BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
  • Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Ally by Anna Banks.

Ally – Feiwel & Friends

He toyed with my heart while I toyed with his trust. Who is the worst offender?
— Chapter 15

He closes his eyes against her logic. Logic has no place where his heart is concerned and this girl who stands before him has become his heart.
— Chapter 38


So we’re at that part of the programme where what I’ve recently read isn’t fit to be shared … yet. And none of us wants to get in trouble, right? So I thought I’d share some thought on the second book of this duology. Thoughts on book one are here.
Remember that the first book ended on that cliffhanger? That one is sort of resolved at the very beginning of the book, but as you can guess this only leads into even more trouble because no one is actually speaking to each other … ah, communication, you hardest of all things.
I quite enjoyed the closed in feeling of the first novel in its setting up the political aspects, characters, and stakes. It only seems like a logical progression that now the second book opens up into the apparently bigger play of world order, some very steep character development, and even higher stakes.
The narrative perspective switches are kept up. I would have thought it interesting if for this book Sepora was the third-person and Tarik the first-person perspective, but maybe that would have been too confusing. There were also quite a few twists and I definitely didn’t see some of them coming. One even had me flipping back a page to reconfirm what I had just read.
I will say though that I felt this second book was a little too burdened in terms of what it had to achieve. There is a lot of character growth going on and also a hand full of new characters thrown in and the world definitely expands. It felt just a tad rushed at times where possibly a little more lingering and elaboration would have helped. Like maybe this was originally enough plot for two books but had to be condensed into one. Only speculating here, of course. I would have liked for there to be a third book, even if most of my questions have been more or less sufficiently answered by the end of this one.

If you look at the first book you’ll see that the cover design of this one is quite different. Is that something that would bother you or something that you could easily accept? Share your thoughts and teasers in the comments!

3 comments:

sjhigbee said...

Thank you for that excellent review of this interesting read - I really like the quotes, particularly the first one. Yes... I have read books where I felt it had originally been written as one thing and then turned into something else. And yes - a massive change in a series cover winds me up. If the characters and storyline are a continuation, then the cover should reflect that, I think. Many thanks, Julika - I like the sound of this one and she's an author I haven't encountered before.

Kathy Martin said...

I have both the first and second book on my TBR mountain. I do hope to get to them someday. (sigh) This week I have Through the Fire by Katie Ruggle from my review stack. Happy reading!

Laura said...

Good teasers. The first one is particularly thought provoking. My Teaser is from an urban fantasy, Venom in the Veins, again.

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