Grim Tuesday

The second installment of the Keys to the Kingdom series left a familiar taste in my mouth... in that it was almost identical, beat by beat, to the first story. Not a bad thing if you really liked the first book, but I was hoping for a bit of a shake up. The deus ex machina was dialed up to 11 in this book though, which I find hard to look beyond because it is just so glaring. Though I have to give the author credit for completely subverting reader expectations to the degree that it almost feels like you're reading a Dungeons and Dragons campaign with a frazzled DM and an uncooperative party. Every time there seems to be a simple solution, the plot actually goes in a buck wild direction that just ends up working (in a massive cave that makes using the Improbable Stair dangerous? Let's just use wings that only fly up and then spider climb across the ceiling of the cave!). As an avid reader of fantasy, I am a lover of a hard magic system. I tend to find soft magic to be rarely done well, often coming across as lazy writing. But I have to say that I don't mind it at all in this series so far. I think the author successfully builds up the mysticism of the world that a soft magic system does make sense, and the random limitations that drive the plot forward do tend to have good reasoning and logic behind them. I'm rating this the same as the first book (remember, two stars is okay!), but I am walking into the third book a bit more intrigued than I was coming into this one.