I was really, really disappointed with The Shining City. I mean, the "Tower o' Mists" moment should have confirmed that the book wasn't improving, but I persevered, in vain.
In The Tower of Ravens, we meet Rhiannon and Lewen. They spend the book travelling across the country towards the capital city with a bunch of fellow students and two teachers. They have their adventures along the way, we get to know them, get to know a bit about the land we're in, and the novel as a whole was all fairly engaging, despite the Scottish accents. In The Shining City, all our characters arrive in the capital city, and immediately Rhiannon is arrested and put in prison. And she spends the entire book there. She alternates between despairing, despairing some more, and having speedy sex in her prison cell with Lewen. Then getting back to despairing. Suddenly we're getting to know the royal family, having some complex history introduced into the story, and more and more characters with increasingly weird political motivations introduced. These may not be problems if you've reading the Witches of Eileanan series, but it's rather confusing if you haven't. (Maybe I would have liked this book better if I'd reading the Eileanan books. But then what's the point of it being a stand-alone series?)
It's just too different to the first book - I really enjoyed Tower of Ravens, but I found Shining City completely unengaging. I spent most of the time being frustrated with the characters, and then with the plot. With great disappointment (and a caveat that, yes, I will read the third book anyway, given that this one ended on an enormous cliffhanger), 2.5 out of 5.
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