A review by leann_bolesch
The Demon World by Sally Green

adventurous

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

 

At this point my strongest emotional response to this story is pity for Ambrose. All relationships with Catherine are beginning to feel toxic. Only her maid is safe. 

Well, I will say I enjoyed this one quite a bit more than the last book. A lot of my previous complaints remain, but at least Holywell is pretty thoroughly dead. Also, a lot of the things that irked me in the first book genuinely are better in this one. That being said, I did find a few issues in this book that either weren’t present or weren’t as egregious in the last book. 

After our protagonists all come together in the end of the previous book, they are quickly split into roughly the same factions as before, minus Tzsayn and whichever supporting characters we’ve killed off. That helped a lot with contributing to the return of some of the old issues. 

Edyon and March split off from the group’s antics still don’t feel like they contribute enough to the plot. I have to assume Edyon’s going to make some major contributions in the final book or else these characters really didn’t do enough to justify the ink expended on them. Even then, these two accomplish very little while separated from Catherine’s faction, such that it feels like they ultimately took a long detour for the sake of Catherine’s arc rather than their own narrative. I almost wonder if their plot exists just to justify putting their characters in the book. They really barely feel like they have a reason to be here. Edyon at least got to interact with more characters in this book, so there’s that. I would have liked to see him successfully charm people a little, but whatever. He doesn’t develop so much as get expanded upon, with a whole grand moment about being honest (he still tells some lies by omission during it) and the implication that his kleptomania is a symptom of some sort of stress/depression state. Meaning we now get to know when Edyon is angsty by how many thinks he pinches. Weird that the multiple abusive imprisonments didn’t trigger that compulsive behavior. 

March still sucks. He sucks less when out of Holywell’s influence, but I’d hardly call him redeemed. He does make an earnest effort to be a good person in this book and show some real dedication, but he hasn’t really gotten over himself. He’s still okay with his stupid, nonsensical revenge and just thinks that the specific method Holywell picked was a bad idea. Also, March’s name is March because he was born in March. That’s not an inherent fault in his character writing, but I can’t tell you how much I hate that on a world building level. I’m not going to give the full rant. I just want to point out that we see samples of the Abask language in this book and it’s very explicitly not English, and “March” is specifically the English name for the third month of the year. 

Non spoiler summary of the following paragraph: March is still an ungrateful little sack of crap and this book doesn’t actually give the counter arguments that it thinks it does. 

Edyon is right to not accept his sob story. The Brigatines killing the Abask is a bigger deal than the Caliorians failing to defend them. There’s still no evidence Abask was sacrificed either. The book acts like there is when Edyon hears the Calidorians decide not to defend the mountain territory, but they discuss it as though they have defended it previously despite it being a tactical nightmare and their justification for not doing so this time is that it is now uninhabited. Are they supposed to sacrifice men just for the sentimentality of the mountain? The prince also expresses hurt and personal betrayal when asserting that he cared for and trusted March. Which, like, again, he had no issue in the last book mentioning that he had a love child in March’s presence, so why am I going to doubt that assertion? March’s only justification for how the prince’s kindness to him was actually bad was that he couldn’t get any other job. How is it the fault of the guy who gave you a job that no one else is going to hire you? You can hate your job under those circumstances, but the guy who gave it to you is still willing to give you a job when no one else would.

At least I won’t have to dock a star from any of my reviews of this series over Holywell apologism. Edyon does point out that Holywell was a piece of crap.

 Edyon and March profess their love a lot. It’s unbearable for them to be separated or see the other hurt. I think they might have known each other for two months at this point? Edyon’s attraction still seems entirely physical. I still don’t understand why March thinks Edyon is special either. He indicates other people have complimented his looks after all, and the Cali prince was still nice to him first and that counted for nothing. This book tries to pitch it was being about how Edyon risked himself for March, but March came across as already interested in Edyon before that point and trying to deny it. It really feels like the author wanted to include a gay couple and figured it would be easiest to use these two because they’re the only two POV guys in regular proximity, regardless of any chemistry they have. I kind of wish she’d have instead made, say, Tzsayn be upset about the arranged marriage in the last book because he had a male lover or something. 

Speaking of, we do get a Tzsayn POV chapter in this book. I was really excited to see more of his thoughts, and with the promise that he’d have an active role throughout the book. I was wrong. He only gets a POV for the very first chapter of the book so we can see him sacrifice his own protection for Catherine’s sake, since he’s fallen so head over heels for her so unrealistically fast. For all disbelief in the sincerity of Edyon and March’s romance, they at least get more time to work on it and March gets to fall for Edyon more gradually. Tzsayn has spent all of a week with Catherine and is very aware that she’s into her knight. 

Ambrose, Catherine’s other suitor, I now realize benefited from being on his own for a good part of the last book. He very much feels like an accessory to Catherine in this book. An emotionally abused accessory. I still think he’s a likable character, but I don’t have much to say about him beyond that I like his personality and I’m glad he’s more directly involved in the political machinations this time. He doesn’t have much of a character arc. I was expecting him to grapple more with the loss of his family and his rage over that, but at some point the emotional manipulation he was enduring seemed to eclipse that. He still has moments 

I liked the chapter that was just Ambrose panicking about a lie Catherine tells him. We barely get any detail about his surroundings or physical actions and I'd normally be critical of that in a book, but in this instance it felt deliberate. His emotional reaction to the situation was very realistic, and the lack of other detail made it feel like his mind was racing so much that he couldn't pay attention to anything around him. It sold the emotion nicely.

I suppose I should mention that I think Green generally does a good job of balancing action, description, and dialogue. I don't think I gave any description to her overall writing in my review of the first book. It's the sort of serviceable writing where nothing stands out as beautiful in a way that might distract from the story itself and nothing grates on you by feeling amateur. Just a solid writing style for acting as a vehicle to impart a story.

Catherine absolutely has an arc and it shows she’s not worth loving. In story. She’s still an enjoyable and active character who far and away does the most to drive the plot. If half the POV characters hadn’t split off from her, they might all feel like supporting cast to her heroine role for as active a character as she is. Catherine, in addition to a mini arc where she grapples with her mortality, becomes more focused on seizing power in this book, which she goes as far as to say is for her own sake. While she never does anything irreversibly immoral, she repeatedly shows herself willing, if sometimes reluctantly, to sacrifice, manipulate, and abuse those around her for the sake of maintaining her authority and the sense of security that comes with it. 

This makes her relationship with Ambrose much more interesting than the previous book. They now interact regularly, with Catherine treating is as mutual pining turned accepted feelings despite putting Ambrose through the wringer. After initially reciprocating his advances, she very brutally puts him at a distance and then dangles hope in front of him again when he has the good sense to say he’ll move on from her. I hope he does move on in the end, but I also liked their heart to heart. It was very nice to see them spell out for one another their impressions of the other from their formal interactions in the past and how they had to grapple with their expanded understanding of each other in the present. (Well, Ambrose had to grapple with realizing Catherine wasn’t his ideal, anyway. Catherine just had to grapple with the fact that Ambrose was only going to take so much exploitation of his feelings for her.) 

Tash sort of swapped roles with Edyon and March from the previous book, which is to say that those two are basically just on the move in order to get characters where they need to be at the end of the book while Tash is the one now making demon-related discoveries. Her character doesn’t change much over this book either. She starts off wanting to learn more about demons and stop hunting them, and she stays that way. The only change on her end is the information she acquires. The author made a good call in which characters Tash was paired with in this book. Her dynamic with her new companions isn’t as good as what she had with Gravell, but she seems to work well with just about anyone. 

That’s my long-winded thoughts on the characters and romance. Now for the plot. 

The demon smoke debate was needlessly drawn out. The only reason it takes Catherine as long as it does to think to just demonstrate how the smoke works to the other nobles is… I don’t even think it’s for plot contrivance reasons. There’s nothing in particular gained in terms of narrative convenience for the author. Catherine just takes forever to think of doing a demonstration for no reason. 

The invading army mostly takes a backseat in this book so minor antagonist Farrow can become the main obstacle of two different plots. I found Farrow more annoying as an antagonist than Aloysius and Boris, and I’d thought Boris was a concentrated gallon jug of pure liquid nuisance. I found most of Catherine’s antagonists more annoying than Aloysius and Boris for that matter. Talk about repetitive. The first book establishes that Brigant is extremely misogynistic to the point that women all learn sign language so they can communicate while adhering to a rule that they be seen and not heard. Pitoria, meanwhile, is framed with characters like Erin Foss as allowing women to fill men’s roles, even if it’s not particularly common. Most of the push back Catherine receives in the first book, including from Farrow, was to do with her being the princess of a country with a reputation for violence which then declared war on Pitoria. 

In this book, the Pitorian are all instead scandalized that Cahterine, a woman, would dare try to do things that men do. That she’s also the daughter of the tyrant king who’s attacking them is treated as more of an extra offense they can tack onto her more serious crimes like hearing a criminal proceeding while having boobs and encouraging the military to take threats seriously while having boobs. There’s even an assassin acting alone who wants her dead because he hates women, rather than because of her ties to the invading army or the assassination of the king. Her war against the patriarchy wasn’t too egregious in the last book because it felt more restrained. All the Pitorian characters either didn’t mind her asserting herself or encouraged it, and it was mostly her dumb brother she was fighting. Now it feels like Pitoria was retconned to be more sexist just so Catherine can continue the good fight. Thank heavens we upped the sexism in the setting so Catherine could expand her war against the patriarchy rather than make some freaking progress in the actual war with an invading hostile kingdom. 

I always hate when books do this, but it was still less annoying than Holywell. I really hated Holywell. Actually, annoying as the seeming retcon was, it still wasn’t as aggressively sexist as Boris, so even if I dislike it more on a narrative level, it was still less grating on a page-by-page level. 

That being said, there was a constant sense of plot movement happening with Catherine’s faction, even if a large part of the plot felt like a stall, and a constant sense of discovery from Tash’s faction. It was only Edyon and March’s plot that felt like a load of nothing. In hindsight, there was a sense of middle-bookness in that the plot was largely travel and intranational politics during a ceasefire in a story that’s ostensibly about an international conflict, but the three more compelling characters’ drama and arcs were still interesting enough to keep me engaged, and whatever annoyances