I read the first book years ago and liked it. Then when it came to the 2nd book, I procrastinated mostly because of the first page of bad reviews. I ran out of other books to buy this month and finally got this and I really shouldn’t have waited so long.
Firstly, the narration is fine. The reviewers giving this whole book a 1 star just for the narration alone are childish for doing so.
Second, the reviews complaining about the moral compass of the main character also seem to be rather off-base especially if you’ve been immersed in this genre for any length of time. The main character agonizes over each death almost every single time. In this genre, I find it even more unbelievable that someone kills their first person in the first 5 minutes of the book and then acts like they’ve been doing it all their life which seems to be the fairly common trope since I assume authors don’t want to bother writing about messy feelings and just get right to the action. For those reviewers, maybe they were expecting YA content but if they’ve actually read the book, Allistor’s actions seem fairly reasonable to me in a post-apocalyptic world where you can rarely trust anyone. The main character has been literally and figuratively stabbed in the back (and in the front) multiple times and I’m more surprised he’s not more paranoid and vindictive.
One complaint holds true though: the bad guys are almost cartoonishly bad. They obviously do a ton of irredeemably bad things, incredibly selfish, and also talk like bad guys who give themselves away as “the bad guy” right when you meet them. If a traitor is found, they also give themselves away almost immediately and they conveniently have no friends among the crowd and no one who liked them (spies are supposed to be likeable or they’re not good spies!).
Other than my one issue, I generally liked this book. The pacing is great, the characters are likeable, and I genuinely want to know what happens next. I’ll be getting the third book without procrastinating this time around.