It took me a while to get into All of Our Demise; it’s part two of what’s basically the Tri-Wizard tournament mixed with the Hunger Games. There’s magic in this world, but the more powerful high magic is controlled by a select group. There are seven families, who once a generation send a champion into a tournament from which only the winner emerges alive, and whoever said winner represents gets to control the high magic for the next generation.
In the second volume, the first half of the story is mostly character and some world development as the plot essentially stalls for while as everyone fights various personal and small inter-group battles. By the end of volume one, all of the remaining champions have figured out that if they work together they might be able to kill the tournament forever. Not as easy as it sounds naturally since they’ve spent a good bit of the first novel betraying and/or trying to murder each other. Some of this keeps up in volume two, but not near to the same extent.
Each character essentially has to give up something they had thought defined them in order for everyone to be able to come together to finally stop the tournament especially with who might be involved in wanting to see the tournament continue. The one character who does not manage to do this gets a different ending than the rest, and I have to say that didn’t bother me all that much because that individual never quite came across as sincere. There’s another character who doesn’t really change much but does have to give up something they’d thought was an integral part of their identity; although said individual never grew on me, neither did they really bother me, probably on account of this being the person with the least character development of the main bunch.
What did annoy me a good bit is the attempted redemption arc for one of the key antagonists of the first volume, and the addition of the romantic attachment just was overkill. One of the other romances actually seemed to work well but given the individuals involved it does come out of nowhere which kind of undermines what could have been a genuinely touching development.
So a lot of the actually action and finally getting themselves together happens in the second half of the book, which makes for an interesting second half, but it does take a while to get there. It’s the right ending I think, but it took longer than it had to to get there. The emphasis on the outside media also doesn’t help much, although I suspect there could be some sort of commentary there if you really wanted there to be.
