Book two of a trilogy which I hope to complete reading, because that was a childhood wish of mine I never got to complete as a young'un. Spoilers ahead.
Nat and Woody join the Twilight Circus, a circus consisting of all sorts of magical and mystical creatures, as they travel Europe in hope of finding Woody's family. But when they settle down somewhere in France they find out that odd things are happening: Children are going missing and a dark threat involving vampires seems to be looming. And Scale is attached to it in some way or form. Will Nat and Woody find a way to save the children and stop the vampires?
A neat second installment, I think I liked it a bit better than book one, though not by much. The world-building was decent and I quite like our cast (both the old and the new characters). Old favorites are of course Nat himself and Woody, but there's also quite a few newcomers I enjoyed.
It was also neat to see Nat starting to embrace the Wolven side of him more. It's something he struggles with throughout this book, since he is kinda-but-also-kinda-not a Wolven. But by the end of this book he gets more in touch with his Wolven side and it was cool to see, especially during the climax like this.
I was a bit disappointed to see that Scale (book one's villain) was revived and seems to be set up to be the ultimate villain for book three. He wasn't very interesting in book one, in this book he's mostly active in the background but not much on-page itself, and I don't know, I just never really found this character to be particularly compelling or nuanced. He's just a one-dimensional villain, that's it. Even the Vampire Queen, who takes center stage in book two as the main antagonist, is a lot more interesting than Scale if you ask me.
The climax was epic and I also like how the mystery of the missing children was slowly revealed rather than spoodfed to us.
I was also pleasantly surprised that the Twilight Circus is actually a good and pleasant place for the characters to be at. When I first saw that this book was about a circus + the reputation and history circuses have in real life + the focus on magical creatures, I was afraid that the Twilight Circus was gonna be an abusive freakshow kind of place where the magical creatures there are exploited and put on display for money.
But instead the Circus is actually a really nice and pleasant place where everyone's free to come and go as they please and be their magical selves, and honestly it's just kind of a big found family of magical creatures. The Twilight Circus is ran by Nat's grandfather and pretty much everyone there is a magical creature or someone related in one way or form to them (like Nat's human family), and it functions as kind of a nice refuge for the mythical creatures. Just a nice twist on the trope.
So yeah, a good book two. It felt less mean-spirited than book one (which was a criticism I had for it) and was a genuinely engaging story with neat character writing.
Rating: 4/5
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