Book Review: Siren’s Fury by Mary Weber

Genre: Fantasy, Young Adult

Series: Book #2 of The Storm Siren Trilogy

Publisher: Thomas Nelson/Harper Collins (June 2, 2015)

Author Information: Website | Twitter

Tiara’s Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars

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Full Disclosure: A review copy of this book was provided to me by Thomas Nelson via Netgalley. I would like to thank the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for providing me this opportunity. All opinions expressed from here forward are my own.

In Storm Siren, we met Nym, a young girl with the ability to control the elements who has spent most of her life as a slave carted from owner to owner. She finally finds some purpose in life when she’s bought by her fifteenth owner who wants to make her a weapon of war between the warring kingdoms of Faelen (Nym’s home country) and Bron. Siren’s Fury follows the aftermath of Nym’s training and the climatic battle that ensued toward the end, which proved to be full of surprises, even if one surprise seemed fairly obvious given something that was said in the beginning of the book.

The war has ended (for now), but there are things festering beneath the surface, casting a stunning illusion of safety and peace for the two kingdoms. Nym finds herself again at a crossroads while fighting a seemingly uphill battle to secure what they’ve fought so hard for, for the peace many have died for. Allegiances are tested. Allies become enemies, and people once thought potential enemies turn into friends–or at the very least tenuous allies in some cases.

Admittedly, after being let down quite a bit by the last book, I refused to go into this one with high expectations as I did with the last book. I managed to enjoy this one quite a bit more than I did the first book, though. I don’t know if I can blame my lowered expectations on that or not, but I really think this book managed to outperform its predecessor. In the beginning, I thought I was going to continue to have a hard time connecting with Nym, but she grows as a character throughout this book. She doesn’t become this complete sage who’s been through a war she’s still fighting, but she does learn how to temper her some of her actions while still having plenty of scenes that show everything is still a learning process for her.

She still manages to do some really questionable things throughout the book as she tries to figure out how she’s meant to help, learning it’s not easy to know what’s the right thing to do at times. Okay, I’ll admit that Nym still did a load of stupid stuff that irked the hell out of me, but I tried to be forgiving given her circumstances by putting a seventeen year old me in her place. What would I do if I’d been faced with these decisions? How do you know what’s right or wrong when everything seems right and wrong?

Some of the characters came into play that I didn’t really get to see much of in the last book such as Princess Rasha the Luminescent that Nym was a little afraid of in the first book. I was really happy to learn more about how the Luminescent powers worked through Rasha. This book added a little more nuance to powers. The last book described their powers as allowing them to see on a spectrum that shows them how determined a person is on a set course. The more determined they are, the easier the person is to predict. However, even when they’re mostly sure of how a person will act, there’s still some room for error that Rasha acknowledges. One example is when she mentions that she’s “95% sure” about something but that doesn’t rule out the other 5% actually coming to fruition.

I am appreciative that this book wasn’t as heavy handed on the romance as the first. Instead we focus more on court politics, which as I mentioned in my last review, is not exactly Nym’s forte. This book is teeming with deceit, secrets, half-truths, and lies. Because of the new circumstances surrounding this book, the romance is very downplayed and segued in better with the story. So, readers are treated with more story that focuses on the powers and people of the lands than having to deal with page after page of “he loves me, he loves me not.”

It still lacks in some respect to explore many avenues, but it excels in finding a better medium between investing readers in the story of Nym and these people. The writing was more fluid and pieced itself together more while combining the intrigue and action into the story with more finesse. Weber definitely went places with the exploration of her characters this round, and one character I didn’t much care for in the first book really shined in their role in this book.

While I still had some issues with this book, it still felt more complete for me than the first book because there was more meat to the story than the constant romantic struggle. The romantic feelings still spurred many of Nym’s actions, but it was allowed to be more than a book where the story is secondary to the characters’ romantic feelings. This book ends on a cliffhanger much like the last. It isn’t nearly as dramatic, but it still begs readers to hang on to find out what will be thrown Nym’s way in the final book.

More reviews of this series: Storm Siren (reviewed by me), Storm Siren (reviewed by Mogsy)