A review by whimsicallymeghan
Given to the Earth by Mindy McGinnis

2.5

After Khosa was saved by Vincent she has now become Queen of Stille. With this, she has become untouchable, but she still finds the touch of her Stille husband repulsive and longs for his Indiri step-brother Donil. Meanwhile, since Dara can’t be with Vincent, she’s fled on a quest for revenge to take down the Pietra who slaughtered her Indiri people. This novel was better than the first, but not by too much. The plots were still hard to follow, but there was something about them that felt less harsh to read. This one followed the events of what happened in the first and the consequences for all of their actions. It took a while to actually figure out where this story was going. If you tried really hard and kept really focused the reader found they would understand what was happening. We got six points of view, which is two more than the previous book and it honestly didn’t feel like it added a lot to the story. McGinnis kept throwing new things at the reader with different twists or turns that instead of feeling creative or clever, felt more confusing and the reader didn’t understand why they were being added, aside for shock value. The characters were still really flat, but in this, we finally saw that they had personalities and they didn’t all sound the same. That doesn’t mean that the reader liked them, but it was nice to be able to distinguish one from the other. It also didn’t help that the chapters were short and with that came a new point of view so it didn’t feel like we were in one point of view for very long before bouncing off to another. Just when the reader felt they were understanding something the view would switch and they would have to readjust again. The world building was still lacking and we didn’t get much from the world aside from things thrown at us and things we were again supposed to know somehow. The good thing was this was fast-paced and plots happened quick, they didn’t feel like they dragged. Overall, this duology as a whole had a lot of potential, but lack of explanations, world building and dynamic characters had this falling flat.