A review by kiiitasticbooks
This Cursed Light by Emily Thiede

3.0

After absolutely loving This Vicious Grace, I’ve been highly anticipating This Cursed Light. But instead of getting an ending I loved as much as this series’ beginning, I read a continuation that just had me going “eh”.

To begin with, I will say that This Cursed Light does a good job with it’s characters. After meeting such a close group of fonti in the first book, one of the biggest things I was looking forward to was seeing these characters again. I really enjoyed reading these characters joke around with each other and be there through the toughest moments solely because they cared for each other.

I do also want to point out that, while the first book was undoubtably queer, this book seemed to bring it up to an unabashed level. Very early on in This Cursed Light, we point out that a character from the first book is only attracted to people of the same gender, and while I didn’t get the feeling from either my first or second readthrough of This Vicious Grace, I really did enjoy seeing this character get their own side-story romance throughout this sequel.

(I only wish I could have seen a little bit more of it in the first book. It felt almost out of place here.)

The plot for This Cursed Light, on the other hand, felt weak. At the end of This Vicious Grace, Dante has a vision that Crollo will return, and that they will need help from the ghiottes in order to win against this new threat. Of course, I was very interested in seeing an adventure where our returning characters sought out a race of people thought not to exist anymore, but I felt as though This Cursed Light was a little too vague in this adventure. So many exciting things were happening in this book, but the narration never seemed to dwell on it and make them the big moments they should have been.

I also felt as though the ending of this book was weak, especially on the subject of learning what this new, terrible plot made up by Crollo contained. Maybe it is because this series reminds me of another book series I’ve read before (and no judgement for books being similar to others–with how many books exist in the world, there are bound to be similarities!), but I could very easily tell some of the things that were going to happen before they occurred.

(I wish I could do a side-by-side, spoiler filled comparison of the two series. I find my similar thoughts on the two interesting, but I have no one to share it with.)

In all, I ended this book feeling let down. For how much I was anticipating this sequel, it ended up being just “fine” for me. I didn’t hate it. Didn’t love it.

But I wanted to love it.