Happy summer, my friends!

I’m thrilled to be here and give my review of Realms of Wrath and Ruin, book two in Alli Earnest’s The Gate Chronicles!

About a year ago, I was honored to have the chance to read the Advanced Reader Copy for book one, Cities of Smoke and Starlight, and I fell in love with the characters and the world that Earnest built. It was so fun to be able to return to Yalvara so soon with the release of Realms of Wrath and Ruin this month, and I can’t wait to tell you about it. 

Let’s get into it!

Synopsis

The wreck of the Eudora Jayde and battle for the legendary Yalven Gate left Hallie Walker with nothing but nightmares and questions. Taking time off from University to heal doesn’t seem to help; it has only given her too much time to wonder who her parents really are and what secrets they’ve held about her lineage. So, when she receives a telegram from them urging her to return home, she jumps at the chance. Unfortunately, the only person she could convince to take her to Stoneset is dealing with problems of his own.

Kase Shackley is in a tailspin. Wracked with guilt that he couldn’t save his brother, he does his best to lay low and hide. Unfortunately, being the son of the most powerful man in the country makes him an excellent candidate for blackmail. With his father blaming him for the death of his brother and the threat of his past sins coming to light, Kase has one choice: run. The only thing left for him to do is figure out how to tell Hallie he isn’t coming back.

What I liked:

I still love the world of these books. The author did a wonderful job of remedying her “white room syndrome” of the first book, and I could see the opulence of every mansion, the coziness of the taverns, and the dark and ominosity of the forests. I felt so much more immersed in the setting, and that’s exactly what I wanted. 

Something else I’ve loved about these books has been the characters. In this book, the characters are dealing with the death of loved ones and friends from the climax of the previous book. Earnest did a wonderful job showing the different ways each character mourned. She showed how people don’t more linearly through the stages of grief, and it was interesting to see the different ways each character coped. 

I was really excited to see the beginning of a new subplot in the overarching story of Yalvara. In the last book, we got to see the beginning of a war between Jayde, Kase and Hallie’s country of origin, and Cerulene, the neighboring country. I liked that we experienced the ideological result of that attack with the rise of a budding revolution and a “united world” type extremist group. As this subplot grew, it was cool to see how far the extremist ideology penetrated the society and it left me wondering how big it was and how many more people there were in the city who had been “infected” or “seduced” by the idea. The types of characters Earnest chose to reveal as extremists played into this, as it made the extremist group look like it had deeper, more hidden roots than the picture we get through the POV characters.

There wasn’t really any Indiana Jones/Mummy style archeological adventure in this book, and even though I understood why (the characters were in the middle of recovering from their ordeal before the action started picking up), I was still a bit disappointed. But I was happy that the ending of this book set us up to get more of that in book 3. I want to know more about the ancient Yalven population, cultures and magics of the world and go galivanting after buried artifacts. 

However, I was pleased that the ending set the stage for the relationship between Hallie and Kase to get messed up in the next book. Even though I know within my heart of hearts they are going to end up together, I’m really excited to see everything that they worked towards in this book get shaken at the roots. I really, really wanted Kase to have some competition for Hallie’s attention in the last book, but unfortunately the opportunity that arose was squashed almost immediately. I am so ready for their relationship to get tested and I’m stoked to see how.

What I didn’t like:

I didn’t have a ton of things I wasn’t a fan of in this book, and everything I list here is either a small, nitpicky thing or a personal, reader preference.

First off, I would have preferred that the book had started in Chapter 2. It opens to the funeral of a character from the last book, but nothing really happens in Chapter 1 outside of allowing us to see what funerals look like in this culture. I feel like it would have better served for the book’s pacing had we gotten glimpses of the funeral in flashbacks and moments where the characters are reminiscing (or avoiding reminiscing), and I feel like I wouldn’t have missed anything at all if I had skipped Chapter 1 altogether.

This book was a bit too romance heavy for me, and I felt like all the action and the things I liked about the first book took a backseat. But this book series is marketed as having a romantic angle (similar to the 1997 Anastasia movie), so it only made sense that the romance element got heavy airtime. Personally, I’m not a fan of romance and I’m totally fine if books don’t have any in it, so this critique is really just a reader preference. If you’re someone who loves romance in your stories, you’ll probably really enjoy it because it was well-written.

There were a small handful of pop-culture references that pulled me out of the world pretty abruptly. It was well established in book one that the world’s culture was built upon classic literature and Shakspeare, and it gave the world a very distinct aesthetic. However, to have references to Star Wars, Spider-man, and the Harry Potter “always” jerked me right out of the story. This might be because I feel these references lend themselves to the “pop-culture/nerd” aesthetic we see prevalent today, rather than the old world, classical aesthetic that was established on reading The Odyssey and that uses Shakespearean insults to smear one another. 

The last thing I wasn’t a fan of I briefly mentioned in the previous section. I would have loved more archeological adventure in this book. As I said, I understand why there wasn’t more of it, however that’s the biggest thing I’ve been invested in so far. The world has an interesting history and a huge potential for treasure and artifact hunting, so going forward, I hope there is a lot more of that.

But regardless of the small handful of things I didn’t like, overall this book was wonderful! The author really leveled up her writing game between these two books, which made me very happy to see. If you haven’t already checked out the first book, Cities of Smoke and Starlight, I recommend you do, because Realms of Wrath and Ruin is a ride you won’t want to miss.

Content Warnings:

• Violence: Medium. Non-graphic torture, shoot outs.
• Language: Mild. World-specific cussing.
• Sexual content: Mild. Chaste kissing and hand holding. 
• 4/5 stars