Book two, Shadow of Night, was long. Very long. I don’t care that it wasn’t physically longer than Discovery of Witches – it was still LONGER. Packed with words, people, experiences, foreshadowing. Which is what second books often do. They’re the glue that connects the first and last book and they are quite often a very sticky mess of words. And Shadow of Night was that. A sticky mess of words. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes plodding, sometimes confusing.
I didn’t dislike anything about the book, except for Matthew who I only barely liked in the 21st century and liked even less in the 16th. And, I do still have issues with Diana, whose backbone comes and goes more often than her Firedrake.
I’m hopeful that we plodded through England, France, England, Prague, England for good reason – and in the final book, everything will come together and we’ll understand why it took so long for the story to move along in book two.