After loving The Sunbearer Trials, this one fell flat for me. Which was a disappointment with the character growth that occurred (but mostly in the last quarter of the book). It dragged on in parts to the point that I almost wanted to DNF it, but I wanted to see how the duology ended since I loved the first book. There were just too many "side quests" that they popped into on their way to Los Restos and those could have been slimmed down a lot to get the same points across. I think it's still worth a read if you liked the first one.