Thank you to NetGalley and Entangled Teen for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.
Molly – WHY DO YOU KEEP DOING THIS?! The ending of Ember of Night made me cackle loudly at 3 am (like witch cackle) and I was impatiently waiting for Shadow of Light to find out what happened next. However, the epilogue of this book made me furious! Which, to be fair, is good? Because now I cannot wait until book 3 comes out since there is clearly more to it than what we found out.
So this book follows Harley & the gang into the Ather in order to break the connection between Marid and Ray while figuring out more about who Harley is and what her powers mean. The Ather is what we would call Hell, but it is so much more than that and Molly does an amazing job with the world building – giving each area & different types of demons in the area their own type of personality/existence. There was a level of this book that felt like filler, so I could see how for some people it could drag (it definitely did for me here and there in tiny spots) but in the end it was all very necessary. Harley did annoy me the same way she did in the first book of just being so angry all of the time, which I get, but also I just wanted to tell her to calm down sometimes and not jump to the worst conclusion always. There was a lot of different mini adventures that happened on the way to finding Marid, and the final battles were epic in my opinion. The whole book felt a lot like a Dungeons and Dragons adventure/dungeon which I am completely here for as a D&D player.
I think we learned a lot of really cool things in this book about the characters, we met some really interesting new characters, and I am so intrigued to see where we go from here in the conclusion of this series. It is not often I read a dark YA book that doesn’t feel overly dark, which is a strange thing to say. I really enjoyed this. 5/5