In this second installment of Derting’s Pledge novels, Charlie is now the unlikely queen of Ludania, but the former, evil queen Sabara is not gone. Her spirit, or essence, resides within Charlie. The new queen, while inexperienced and uncomfortable in her role, has been able to make some sweeping changes across the country, including the banning of executions, and allowing freedom of speech. She still has much to learn, and sets off to a conference where she will meet the queens of the surrounding nations. At the conference, Sabara makes her sinister presence more and more clear. Her desires for the immortal Niko cloud Charlie’s own feelings for Max, creating a strange, and extraneous, kind of love triangle. Max, her love interest in the first novel, gets little page time, except as a foil for Charlie/Sabara’s feelings for Niko. While the majority of the story is told from Charlie’s perspective, intermittent point of view changes make the narrative choppy. Pair this with an undeterminable setting, along with too many supernatural/dystopian/fantasy elements mish-mashed together, and you’ve got a book with no real sense of direction.
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