3.5 Stars

Serpent & Dove was one of my top reads in 2019 and I’ve been not-so-patiently waiting for the sequel since last September. For the past few months, I have been anxiously watching the Goodreads rating for Blood & Honey drop sharply, and then steadily climb, only to drop again. I was scared to read this book, worried that it wouldn’t live up to Serpent & Dove, and rather terrified that it would completely suck and I’d be left with crushing disappointment. Well, having now read Blood & Honey, I can say that it wasn’t a total let-down, but it didn’t grab me the way that Serpent & Dove did, either.

Blood & Honey picks up pretty much where Serpent & Dove finishes. I highly recommend doing a re-read if the details from the first book are a little foggy in your brain as there is very little recap in the sequel. Lou and Reid, along with Coco, Ansel, Beau, and Madame Labelle, are on the run from pretty much everyone: the witches, the Chasseurs, the King, even their own memories. They are desperate to save and protect each other, but their actions only serve to wrench them further apart.

The biggest problem I had with this book was that I simply didn’t like a lot of the characters most of the time. They did stupid things in the name of protecting one another. They kept secrets. They refused to face their emotions. Honestly, I wanted to scream and shake Lou and Reid for most of the book. So many problems would have been solved had they just communicated! They also felt grossly different from the characters I had come to know and love in Serpent & Dove. Yes, they have gone through an extreme amount of trauma and suffering, but they still seemed so unnecessarily warped and dark.

We’re also introduced to a whole host of new characters, and I wonder if they were all entirely necessary for the story. A handful of side characters from the first book also make an appearance, but it was unclear as to what purpose they serve, other than to help move the plot along.

The plot itself wasn’t as engaging in this book either. For a lot of the story, nothing overly dramatic and earth-shattering happened, not like in Serpent & Dove. It was easy to guess where the plot was going, and rather disappointing when it did exactly what you expected. There was very little of the shocking twists and turns of the first book. The story did pick up in the last third or so of the book and, understandably, it sets up for the final book in the trilogy. However, I can’t help but wonder if Mahurin would have been better off in sticking with the originally-planned duology and cut out a lot of the extraneous plot in Blood & Honey.

With all that being said though, this was still a fairly easy and nonetheless enjoyable read. I didn’t have to force myself to keep going and once the story picked up in the later part of the book, I found myself caught up in it. Although I had guessed at the major twist, it didn’t make it any less shocking, and since the book ends on somewhat of a cliffhanger, I’m eager to see where the final book will lead. This series still shows promise, and I really hope Mahurin has something mind-blowing planned for Book 3.