We watch them react to mysteries, to conflict, and to loss, and we see them coming to terms with new realities and dealing with betrayal in different ways-and yet the feeling is still there, that these fantastical situations are at the same time not unlike feelings we’ve all had, situations that can and do happen in the real world so the question we might ask ourselves, after reading this book, is do we stand our ground and fight, or do we blend in and hide? She balances the perspectives of her two main POV characters, Mara and Emil, with deft precision, and paints the emotional journeys of both with deeply sympathetic colors. The allure of it all lies in how much we don’t know about certain characters, how much we think we know, and the vast amount of backstory that lies hidden in the shadows, waiting for its moment in the light. She takes a people group that was almost an enigma in the first book and features them in this one, creating a sense of familiarity, and a deeper perspective into the world she’s created. It took a moment to realize just how Forster connects the two books-not just in the matter of location, but another, brilliantly subtle way that I won’t spoil here, but it is really brilliant, and when I figured it out, it made the adventure all the more fascinating! and then almost immediately upon finishing it, lo and behold I discovered the prequel (so, not totally a sequel.) on the library shelf! So, naturally, when I had exhausted all my other checkouts, I read that one too. In this case, I read City of A Thousand Dolls because it had been sitting on my Kindle app since 2015.
It also really put the nature of sequels to the test: of I could pick up the next book a year later and feel like almost no time had passed, it was a good sequel! Sometimes that worked, as I would be able to keep myself occupied, as it were, while waiting for the release of the next book in the series. I purposefully read a series one book at a time, waiting gaps between each installment, reading other books before returning to the series again.
I decided long ago that I wasn’t going to be somebody who got stuck in the middle of a long series as long as there were other books to read.
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