A lot of the pleasure of the first book came from seeing the Archipelago for the first time. Creatures, places and rules thrown at you constantly, and the sense that anything might be round the next corner. A sequel cannot do that twice, so instead this one makes the world feel real.

There are politics now. Families, money, greed, power, people using creatures for their own ends. The Archipelago starts to feel like somewhere people actually live rather than somewhere Christopher has gone to have an adventure.

Anya

Anya is what makes the book. She is a princess who plainly does not want to be one, far happier with birds and plants and the forest, and she hates being watched and shaped into whatever a princess is supposed to be.

Her relationship with the gaganas is the best thing in it. They are not cute animal sidekicks. They are rude, clever, loyal, argumentative and occasionally disgusting. The idea that they have essentially educated her, teaching her everything from history to sword fighting, is ridiculous and it completely works.

Underneath that there is something sharper. Anya is constantly being told what she is meant to be, trained to smile properly and laugh properly and walk properly, performing a princess for everyone around her. Once she gets good at it she is trapped further, because now the family can see a use for her.

Then her grandfather is poisoned and her father is blamed.

That is where the book gets going. Anya does not turn into a calm little detective. She loses it completely when her father is arrested. She screams, fights, bites, kicks, tries to get to him. It reads like an actual child reacting to something terrifying rather than a child written as a forty year old.

The mystery is not hard to solve. I had a fair idea where it was going long before Anya had the proof, and it does not matter, because the interesting question is not who did it. It is what she does once she knows.

Christopher, and the shape of the plot

Christopher is good in this one too. The opening with Jacques turning up and chewing on his face is a fine way back in, and he is no longer discovering the Archipelago. He misses it. That changes him. In the first book he is amazed by everything. Here he is someone who has been taken away from a place he now thinks of as his.

Mal is not simply replaced, either. She is absent, and he feels the absence. He thinks about her, dreams about her. The book lets the first story keep costing him something rather than handing him an identical new friendship.

The biggest improvement is the plot. My complaint about the first book was that it sometimes moved task to task: go somewhere, find something, learn you need something else, travel again. There is still some of that, but it is far tighter. The poisoning, Anya's father being framed, the dragon deaths, the stolen gold and Claude all turn out to be the same story rather than several adventures bolted together.

The dead dragons are among the strongest passages. Enormous, beautiful animals, and then you realise you are looking at a massacre. Christopher crying and nearly being sick does far more than sending him straight into hero mode would have.

The ending

Anya finally gets Claude where she wants him. He has murdered her grandfather, betrayed her father and tried to get him executed, killed dragons for their gold, and tried to kill her. And she has a sword.

She understands that killing him will not free her from him. She sees the person she could become if she lets revenge finish the job, and decides she does not want that in her. She does not forgive him. She does not decide he was secretly good. She just refuses to destroy part of herself for the satisfaction.

And then the dragons deal with him anyway, which is satisfying. Slightly convenient, obviously, but it holds, because Anya has already made her choice. She will not be his executioner. The creatures he has been butchering make their own decision about him. Much better than running him through.

What I liked less

Claude is a good villain but not a deep one. Once you know what he has done, he is greed, jealousy and appetite for power. The betrayal hurts because Argus genuinely loved him, rather than because Claude himself is complicated.

The book is still very busy. Rundell seems incapable of having one good idea where twelve are available. Sometimes that is the joy of it. Sometimes I wanted it to stop producing new creatures and places and magic and let the characters sit in a room together.

And I missed Mal. Not because Anya is worse, she is not, they are completely different. But Christopher and Mal had something in the first book that nothing here quite matches, and nothing affected me the way Gelifen did.

Even so

Anya gets the best character journey in the series so far. She starts trapped in a role everyone else chose for her. By the end people are bowing to her, and not because she is a princess, but because of what she has done. And then she walks away from the throne anyway.

The ending also refuses to pretend everything is fine afterwards. Anya has won, her father is alive, the danger has passed, and neither of them comes through untouched. That is the thing these books do surprisingly well. There is wonder and there are jokes, and underneath it Rundell is entirely willing to let things hurt.

Written by a collector who owns the editions catalogued on this site. Independent, unpaid and not supplied by the publisher. Corrections to info@theneverfear.com.