Betrayal turns a love story into a war story as she rebuilds an army and he tries to earn back the unforgivable.
- Score
- 80.8
- Spice
- 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️Sweet
- POV
- multi
- Ending
- HEA / HFN
Tropes
Content warnings
Curated signals, not an exhaustive guarantee.
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What readers think
Readers consistently praise the tonal courage of this sequel — Taylor deliberately strips away the whimsy and romance of book one to deliver something rawer and more harrowing, and most reviewers consider this bold rather than disappointing. The prose remains the defining strength: hypnotic, precise, and devastating. The expansion of the war and both factions' internal politics is widely celebrated for adding genuine moral complexity. The most common criticism is structural: multiple POV shifts feel choppy, supporting characters (especially Zuzana and Mik) feel tonally out of place amid the grimness, and Karou's passive, guilt-ridden arc frustrates readers who loved her agency in book one. Some reviewers flag the middle-book syndrome — a slow first half before the momentum builds. Goodreads consensus sits around 4.1 stars, with readers who lean into war fantasy rating it as high as book one; readers who came for romance tend to feel stranded.
Read it if
- · Readers of book one willing to follow Taylor into much darker, war-focused territory with the romance on pause
- · Fans of morally complex war narratives where both sides commit atrocities and no faction is purely heroic
- · Prose-first readers who will forgive structural unevenness for writing that is consistently beautiful even at its bleakest
Skip it if
- · You read book one primarily for the romance — the central relationship is almost entirely absent and the book is deeply, intentionally unglamorous about love
- · Genocide, torture, slavery, and attempted sexual assault are hard stops — this is among the darkest YA-adjacent fantasy of its era
- · You need a self-contained story: this is an unresolved middle installment that ends on tension rather than resolution
If you liked this
- · For fans of An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir — equally brutal treatment of occupied peoples, war crimes, and a love that cannot simply overcome systemic violence
- · For fans of The Cruel Prince by Holly Black — morally grey courts, protagonists making terrible choices under impossible pressure, and romance that refuses easy comfort
- · Like Daughter of Smoke & Bone but war has swallowed the wonder — same prose mastery, radically darker emotional register
- · For fans of Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor — readers who want Taylor's full range of lyrical beauty and world-building without the wartime grimness should read Strange the Dreamer instead
In this series
Part of Daughter of Smoke and Bone — read in order:
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