Book review: Nevermoor 2 by Jessica Townsend
The Nevermoor series by Jessica Townsend is one of my favorite series from the books I have recently read. I read the first part around end of last year, and the time I spent reading it was easily some of the best days of last year.
I'll be making a separate post on the first part, but if you are looking for a magical, funny and very very interesting book to read, if you are looking to scratch the itch left by Harry potter series, I would highly recommend you to go and read this series.
This post will have some spoilers for 1st part in open, so if you are planning to read it, I'd suggest you to skip this post. Seriously, if you think you'd be remotely interested in magical fantasy, or interesting world based on magic highly recommend you to leave this post and plan to read the first part.
Spoiler Free Review
After clearing her trials and finding out about her Wunderous abilities, Morrigan has finally joined the Wunderous society. Of course that just means she has to face even more problems, potential threats and a rather dangerous problem of her own while attending the school (even if it is just two classes).
One of the things I loved about the first book was it was a complete story on its own, without any cliffhangers as such. Sure there were open questions, but I could have called it a day and stopped reading after the end, and still I'd be pretty happy about reading a great book. That is, only if I could stop myself from wanting to read the next book.
The second book picks right off the first, with the same pace and excitement. The world of Nevermoor keeps on expanding, and we learn about it along with Morrigan. With the introduction to the classes at WunSoc, we get to see what kind of society Nevermoor is, but unfortunately we never get to see much of the classes apart from two. Hopefully we get to learn more in the 3rd book :)
There are a lot of mysteries in this one, from the missing people to the mysterious notes, and that of Ezra Squall looms over them all. I'd say the missing people one is probably the one that kept me interested the most, the other two go in rather predictable ways after the half-way point. That is not to say it becomes boring, but instead, it keeps you interested in how Morrigan is going to find about them rather than what she is going to find.
I am a fan of the Nevermoor world, and we get to explore it in more detail here, which I loved. That said there are several parts which I would have liked more exploration of, like the bone-men and the classes at WunSoc, but I guess it is a theme of good books to keep you wanting more :p
I clearly love this book, so I don't have much to say in this section, if you have liked first part, you'll like this one too, so you should definitely check it out.
Spoiler Review
This contains some spoilers for the story!
Overall this one definitely managed to keep me interested from start to finish. Every time I thought things would go well for Morrigan, they seemed to go wrong for her in a way I didn't consider. 'To live in interesting times' definitely feels her curse.
Some mysteries were unfortunately made rather obvious because of narritivium cough cough . By the midway of the book, I was almost sure that the blackmailing was done by either WunSoc or Squall, although to give props to writer, I got busy with other stuff that was going on and didn't really care about my theory again until the very end. Also the way Henry (the geography teacher) was written, along with the other circumstances like Morrigan ending up in the alley with Bone men, made it really easy to suspect him working for Squall after we find out about tortoisewun's powers.
However, credit to the writer, or me not being smart, the mystery of missing people and wundercub was something I did not figure out until it was explained. There were just enough pieces moving each time that I could not be certain in my guess ; and with the red herring of the missing celestial, the pieces I had never seemed to fit completely.
That said this is not a mystery/suspense novel at the core, and the world, the people and Morrigan were more than enough to keep me interested and entertained. It was really sad that Morrigan only got two subjects for the whole year, and by proxy we could not read about the others that are taught at WunSoc, nor see what is there on the deeper levels of arcane classes.
It was also interesting to see Ezra mentioning several wretched arts, and then only get to see two by the end. Maybe we'll get to know more in the next part. All the creations of various Wundersmiths were also interesting to read about.
Final thoughts
I really loved the first book in this series, so it wasn't really a surprise that I liked the second one as well. The story and the world grew together nicely. As mentioned in before, if you like magical worlds, or are looking for something that scratches the same itch as Harry potter, I definitely recommend this one.
Have you read this one? What are you thoughts on this? Let me know!