Review: Firewalker - Josephine Angelini

Firewalker 
Josephine Angelini
Series: Worldwalker, #2
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy, Paranormal
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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Thanks to Feiwel and Friends for the ARC I received at BEA. 

Firewalker picks up exactly where Trial by Fire ends, which is -- without giving away too much for anyone who hasn't read the first book -- with a recovering Lily in our/her world.

And they stay in our world for some time, which I was a little saddened by because Angelini did such a fascinating, thorough job worldbuilding in the last book -- it's what gave Trial by Fire a huge chunk of its appeal for me. In fact, the beginning of the book ends up being kinda slow and boring, and it was hard to get through but I kept reading 1. on the hope that once they worldjumped things would pick up and 2. because of the Lillian parts, which I have conflicted feelings about actually.

Okay, so Lillian is sortof my favorite character in this whole series and the more morally ambiguous she gets, the more I like her. And a lot of this book is dedicated into delving into Lillian and her backstory and why she made some decisions she did. And I really liked learning all those things. I just wasn't sure if I liked the way I learned them. A lot of information we get is just told to us, through mindspeak (if you haven't read these books, I'm sure you can figure out what that is) between Lily and Lillian and Lillian is just showing Lily certain things from her life. Some of the scenes were really interesting but it was still just like someone was telling someone else a story for a large number of pages. It would have been nicer to see more action and less explanation.

The book just took a really long time to pick up but it did eventually. Although some of the picking up involved a lot of things that made me angry, like Lily and Rowan (her bae) being really annoying with not telling each other things and keeping secrets. It's like they've never watched a movie or read a book??? Haven't y'all ever heard that honesty is the best policy!!! Also, some of the minor characters, like her friends, didn't seem realistic in the way they handled situations but others were a lot better, like Juliet, her sister (who is amazing).

And there were obviously things I did like as well! We got to explore a lot of Lillian, as I mentioned before, and I liked the ways the characters interacted and it was more of a high stakes kindof deal this time. I also like the way Angelini doesn't make her plots too transparent and she writes really good endings, as this was a cliffhanger much like the last one.

Even though I didn't like Firewalker as much as I liked Trial by Fire, I still liked the way the pace picked up at the end and I'll still stick around to read the conclusion.

- Noor

Have you ever been let down by a sequel?
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