Review Day: Dragonfly Falling by Adrian Tchaikovsky

There are no explicit plot spoilers in these reviews.

Dragonfly Falling is the second book in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series. I loved where this chunk of the story ended up, but had trouble staying invested in the growing sprawl of the storyline across characters and Kinden.

War has come to the doorstep of the Lowlands, forcing the people of neighboring provinces to put aside their traditional enmity and fight back against the Wasp-Kinden. A multi-pronged assault begins with frontal assaults, sneaky alliances, or even just simple words of threatening diplomacy. The protagonists of Book 1 spread out across the Lowlands to sound the alarm and muster defenses. New locales and new types of people with different arthropod traits (the Kinden) are introduced, making it very clear that the story will end up existing at a much grander scale than what was shown in the first book.

I felt like a few of the characters were marking time in this outing. I loved Totho's story as a conflicted artificer and liked Salma's evolution into an unexpected leader, but I thought the rest of the characters had great moments rather than great plotlines.

My main problem with this book was the sheer amount of sprawl -- a few too many new characters to keep track of and not enough time spent in any point of view to form a connection. Every time I was intrigued by a scene, I was suddenly somewhere else in the world, and reading in e-book format made it hard to flip back to see where or if I had met a character previously. This dampened the impact of those characters' later scenes (and sometimes their demises).

I felt like an ant(-Kinden) rolling out pizza dough from the center of the pie. Every time I made progress in one direction, I had to turn around and roll in a different direction. And, while I knew the pizza would be delicious when complete, I lost momentum and incentive every time I switched directions! I had a similar problem reading Miles Cameron's The Red Knight and watching the 2nd season of Game of Thrones.

If you liked Book 1 and can read this one contiguously enough to keep everything fresh in your mind, there's a lot to enjoy here. I still plan to continue to Book 3, maybe just not right away!

Final Grade: B-