Bingo 5: Sheep
OK so All Hail Chaos has as heavy dose of innocence (being lost) and people following (at various levels of blindness either what they want, or what someone else wants). So it fits. Also full disclosure, this was travel reading I finished and then gave to my mom, so if I misspell a name or something, that’s why.
The story continues from the first volume with Rae trying to avoid Rahela’s canonical fate along with the fates of several other characters. She also now has to try avoid getting killed by the Once and Forever Emperor who turns out to be someone she hadn’t anticipated in the first novel, as well as deal with things starting to go differently than she remembers them. This is also the part of the trilogy where the main team gets split up; Rae is on her own with Key, Marius and Cobra are off trying to save Marius’ sister from her canonical fate as well as save some of the country, Lady Lia and Emer are trying to get help (?) in the Cauldron. Rae needs to figure out who is trustworthy in court, or at least who she can trust to end up doing what she wants/needs to save the story now going wrong (very meta-literary, fourth wall still; ti was there in the first part, but it’s much more present now).
Marius and Cobra pick up a new travel friend or two, and one of them turns out to be a big spoiler. There is also a trip to visit the Oracle which has an interesting reveal that surprises Eric but maybe not to the point of him losing innocence. Saving Caracalla does sort of lose Marius some innocence about how much he can protect really. And there’s some interesting character development that results in someone else losing their innocence about the supposed innocence someone else apparently may never have had.
This being part 2 of the trilogy, everything goes spectacularly wrong in many ways by the end, and there’s a cliffhanger as Rae does something that she might know will probably change everything. She has the realization that the story might be fixed if someone else takes a role that was supposed to be filled elsewhere, and she sort of goes for it. She also openly says to Key that being evil was more fun when it was a game, and not so much when it’s just life and reality and survival. There’s also some deaths, of folk we know, one of which is kind of tragic but also heroic.
It’ll be interesting to see how much book 3 follows the arcs being set up for everyone, including a corruption or maybe just dropping of the character, Rae’s choice, the reveals about how the two worlds are sort of connected, and so on.
