Earlier I reviewed The Letter for the King, a popular Dutch YA book. Now it's finally time to take a look at its sequel. Spoilers ahead.
About a year of the events of The Letter for the King, Tiuri and his squire and best friend Piak set out on a quest to discover the secrets of the mysterious Wild Wood, an overgrown forest said to inhabit magical creatures and many ruins. All of this ends up leading to a conflict with the dreaded Black Knight with the Red Shield as his identity finally is revealed and he sets his evil plans into motion.
I liked The Letter for the King quite a bit. Not my favorite book or anything, but it was solid. A strong story with a great epic journey and two heroes who share a very close bond. However, it also still felt very surface-level. The main plot and goal of the first book really just focused on the message Tiuri had to deliver to king Unauwen. While said message contained vital political information about the war with the southern land of Eviellan, we really only focused on Tiuri and not really on the repercussions the letter he delivered would have.
And, after reading this book, I'm honestly okay with that. When I first into The Letter for the King, I expected it to be a standalone with an optional sequel (mostly due to the fact that I never heard people talk about it when the first book is talked about a lot) that isn't a direct continuation. However, it most certainly is a direct sequel and it very much so explores the aftermath of the message Tiuiri had to deliver in the first book, with all the political ups and downs that come with it.
While the Wild Wood (as the title implies) is a huge part of this book, the central conflict is really much more so the war and the fact that Eviellan is trying to carve a road through the overgrown forest in order to invade the kingdom of Unauwen. The Wild Wood is honestly more a setting than anything else. It certainly has its lore and inhabitants, but unlike the rumors would have you suspect there's nothing magical about the location whatsoever. Just a very lush and overgrown forest with some ruins and its own people called the Men in Green (who really are just humans, no goblins or fairies or whatever).
The conflict in this book was very engaging and while at first I was a bit disappointed that the lore of the Wild Woods itself wasn't that thoroughly explored (it is, just not as much as the title would have you suspect), I'm honestly okay with it now. This makes much more sense. The message Tiuri delivered a year ago really screwed over prince Viridian's plan, and now he's trying to make war on Unauwen some other way in order to get the throne.
The characters are still great. I still love Tiuri's and Piak's bond so much. For a moment I was afraid they were going to drift apart because Tiuri ended up having a surface-level crush on someone, but the duo very soon made up and was close once again. The other characters such as Ristridin are good, too, and I enjoyed the character development Jaro and the Fool went through. Lavinia also returns, crossdressing as a male squire in order to join her father's army on its journey, however she once more ends up doing not particularly much. She did have some more pagetime here than in the first book, but in the end she didn't do anything major or even play a big role in any key scenes. She's just mostly there to be Tiuri's love interest but even in the end she leaves pretty unceremoniously.
We also finally have the revealed identities of two mysterious knights, who turn out to be the twin princes of Unauwen, Iridian (the good one, firstborn and heir to the throne) and Viridian (the secondborn, self-proclaimed king of Eviellan who whishes to take over the kingdom of Unauwen). I like them as characters, though Viridian is not all that interesting as a main villain. The fact that they're both twins, look alike and have almost exactly the same name also threw me off a bit. I wish they could've had more original names and for them to be a little more interesting. Right now Iridian is really the stereotypical heroic good prince and Viridian the typical jealous secondborn with not really anything setting them apart from the standard of the tropes.
So I liked this book for the most part. I appreciate Dragt not suddenly taking the fantasy route by making the Wild Woods actually haunted/inhabited by supernatural creatures. Its all just misconceptions that can be explained once you know the lore. The war was also engaging and I liked how Dragt didn't put the focus on the epic battles, but rather in the events preceding and after them. The only thing in this book I wasn't too keen on was the characters, they just feel still a bit too standard too me. But it's still a strong continuation and I actually liked it more than the first!
Rating: 4/5
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