To Dance with Death The Heartrending Conclusion to the Sunday Times bestselling Romantasy

Vasalie may have come back from the dead but that came at a cost - not to her, but to Anton, who paid with his own memories and therefore his sense of self. She may love him but he only sees betrayal, can't recognize her or rule his kingdom.. The only way to get back what he lost is through death herself but how do you bring someone back to be themselves, when all they ever seemed to be is gone, replaced with nothing but distrust and a hate for love itself? I read book 1 again before reading this and was reminded again of the sweet, sweet love story we got, the slow buildup and the yearning.. And then the book ended. Here we pick right back up where we left, but now with a new mission and that one has its own complications.. The brewing war, the general, the new situation Vasalie finds herself in, even a civil war on the horizon. All the while we're really out to save Anton who just isn't Anton any more.. Which is just heartbreaking. And it's got the same feel to it as the first book, a lot going on and all of it will be addressed, all of it will matter and the characters progress in their own stories without being visible, so this story can draw you right back in. The atmosphere is a different one though now - and that's due to the quite jarring location changes Vasalie goes through. We're getting a little of frozen wilderness but before you can get a feel for it, we've left. Vasalie and her newfound power bring us into the underworld and it's quite hard to get a feel for it - partially because of how the location is, as you'll find out in the story, and part of it because there's a whole lot of new places being described and you don't really get that feeling of familiarity the palace in book one gave. What also gets repeated is the whole sense of urgency - last book had the time line of the gathering as a guide of when things have to end, here it's a 30 day ultimatum. While in the first book this was done expertly - like it felt just the way time flows naturally, things happen and before you know it, time's up - in this book this just didn't work so well. The problem was that it took a long time for Vasalie to figure out what to do, which lead to every day feeling the same until the ultimatum approached because she was just doing the same things every day - which at some point just felt like pacing issues to me, unfortunately. That said, at the end the romance did come back and it felt like book 1, as in there was finally action, things were moving, the urgency hit.. I just wish the way there didn't feel so much like we needed to kill time - and I hate to say this because I loved the first book so much and wanted this to just be perfect.. Towards the end we even get an explanation for why things just had to take their time like they did but.. This just wasn't my favourite part of the book. That ending was perfect though. I really enjoyed both - the beginning and the ending to this book because both gave me that exact same feeling as the first book did. The slow build up, the love, the fighting and Anton's experiments and his just wild boy behaviour.. I am so happy to have gotten back to that. Also the dances - with the way things are different in the underworld those dances got an extra layer of magic to them, and I loved them in the first book already. They're dances in book form and yet there's definitively magic there, in the way they're described, the things Vasalie adds to hide her own problems really but when she's dancing, as a reader you're in the audience, you don't know or notice anything you're not supposed to. Overall, a great conclusion to this story and I'm so happy with the way things ended, it really couldn't have been better plotwise. The romance is just on another level, the creativity on both sides just beautiful to watch and I had such a good time with this book, I can't wait to read it again - even though I just finished it. Thank you Del Rey, Random House Worlds and Inklore for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.