I blogged about the first book in this series last year, and was psyched when Kara brought me back an advance copy of the sequel from ALA. This book picks up where the first one left off: Celaena is now the King's Champion (read: his personal assassin), and has been ordered to track down and execute a number of accused traitors (at least one of whom Celaena knows personally). She still would like nothing better than to see an end to the tyrannical king, but she's got too much to lose for her to risk involvement in a rebellion. To make matters worse, her personal relationships with both the Crown Prince and the Captain of the Guard are getting increasingly complex, and the last thing Celaena needs is more friends who can be threatened to keep her in line.
I had just as much fun with this book as I did with its predecessor; I expected this one to suffer from middle book syndrome, but Maas managed to avoid that quite neatly. This book has a plot all its own (with a beginning, middle, and end! Yay!), but also manages to nicely set up the next book without that being the only purpose of this book. I'm also impressed with how Maas has tied in the prequel novellas, which I know are out there, but haven't read: there's a nice balance that lets me know that these stories happened, but I never felt like I needed to read them in order to understand this book.
I'd recommend this to fans of Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley (her Damar books); if anyone out there has read the Glasswright series by Mindy Klasky, it's also a good read-alike for this book.
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