Book Review: The Scarlet Tides by David Hair (Moontide Quartet #2)

 

I've talked about the first book, so let's cover the second! Spoilers ahead.

In this book, the crusades have officially begun. Alaron goes to look for Cym, who took the Scytale with her, while Elena ends up stuck with Kazim and Ramita goes into hiding with her "daughter" Justina. 

I definitely enjoyed this book as much as the first, maybe even more. First things first, yes, some of the problematic things of the first book still persist here, so I won't pretend like this is somehow a much more toned down version of the first book. But I did feel a bit more comfortable reading this. Meiros is dead (something I'm happy for because he was unrightfully portrayed as a good man in the first book a lot) and I do think there may be a tad less racism/G-slurs in this one. It's still there, but it did feel a bit more muted than before.

The story I greatly enjoyed. I loved seeing where all these characters went and how they developed. By now I've also got a few clear favorites: Ramita and Justina. Their relationship is far from perfect, but they're both enjoyable characters in their own right and very strong. Too bad one of them doesn't make it to the end of the book, though. I also really liked how Elena and Kazim developed throughout The Scarlet Tides. There is one character whose POV I could not for the life of me get into though: Ramon. I don't know what it is, but my mind just kind of blacked out during his sections. I vaguely got the gist of what he was up to, but it just didn't interest me in the slightest.

There's also the introduction of the lamiae, which I thought was a really interesting race of creatures. We also got venators, which I presume are somewhat wyvern-like creatures. These different species again add more to this world feeling different to our own, which I can definitely appreciate, as I didn't really like this universe basically aligning with our own in a lot of ways in the first book.

Still not perfect, but I do like this one a bit more than the first book. There's just more going on and we get more interactions between the characters that were established in the first book. 

Rating: 4/5