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This is the 2nd book in the Rai-Kirah trilogy, which I originally read in print five or six years ago.  This past November, I started listening to the series in audio during commutes.  I’m a terrible audiobook listener, but this series is one of my very few successes.

In my review of the first book, I wrote at excessive length about my difficulties with audiobooks and why this series is working for me, so I don’t want to repeat myself too much here.  However, I do want to comment again on the narrator, Kevil Stillwell.  He sets the perfect tone for the main character, the first-person narrator for the story, and he uses recognizably distinct voices for the other main characters.  Most of his reading is done in a fairly understated way.  When he does get more dramatic, it’s always at an appropriate moment, and it has occasionally given me chills.  For me, it’s so much more effective when a narrator saves the drama for special moments.

This story begins a couple years after the previous book ended.  It tells a complete story, with the main issues resolved at the end, but the foundation needed to truly appreciate it is set in the first book, Transformation.  I wouldn’t recommend reading this book first.  There were many new and interesting twists that built on the things we had learned in the first book.  In particular, we learn a lot more about the demons and how the Ezzarians ended up being responsible for protecting the world against them.

There was a lengthy section around the middle that started to feel like it was dragging a little.  Our main character is cut off from everything familiar and, most importantly, he was cut off from all of the secondary characters I enjoyed so much.  The story was still interesting, but my attention started drifting more frequently than it had before.  I remember being completely absorbed by the entire series when I read it in print, so my perspective is likely the result of listening to it over a very long period of time in audio, a format with which I have trouble paying attention to begin with.  Instead of that section lasting for a day or two of reading, it lasted for weeks’ worth of commutes.

There were several great moments throughout the book, and I particularly loved the ending.  I’m not going to have any more opportunities to listen to audiobooks this week, but I look forward to starting the final book next Monday.