HOUSE OF FLAME AND SHADOW

Despite the best efforts of the evil Asteri, Bryce, Hunt, and crew are back to save Midgard in the third installment of Maas’ Crescent City series.

When we last saw Bryce Quinlan, she was escaping an attack from the all-powerful Asteri, the despotic rulers of the planet Midgard. Bryce manages to leap through a portal and finds herself in the Fae’s original home world, where the Fae she meets are recognizable to her, but also somehow more powerful than the Midgardian Fae, who live under the Asteri thumb. These new Fae don’t fully trust the strange woman who appeared in their world out of thin air, and Bryce doesn’t have time to convince them she’s not a threat. When she escapes her holding cell to an underground system of tunnels, she finds the ancient secrets that hold the key to defeating the Asteri once and for all, as well as restoring the people of Midgard to their full power. Armed with both knowledge and weaponry, Bryce opens a portal back to Midgard. But will she make it back in time to save Hunt from the Asteri dungeons? Will her circle of unlikely allies be able to overcome their differences to unite against their evil overlords? Or will the wicked Asteri be two steps ahead and stop their rebellion before it can even start? Book Three somehow finds even bigger extremes than Books One and Two. With a magic system that is loosely defined enough that Maas can make it work in whatever ludicrous ways the plot needs it to, and villains who say things like, “I’m going to teach you a new definition of pain,” this is the kind of writing that gets called a “guilty pleasure.” But it’s certainly not tedious. Though it’s more than 800 pages long, readers may find themselves hauling this heavy book everywhere, unable to put it down.

 Pure entertainment, for better or for worse.