The Strength of the Few

The second book in the Hierarchy series. I flew through this book. It was a long book, about 700 pages, but I couldn’t put it down. I was reading it every chance I got. I even got to soccer practice early just so I could read it. For a 700 page book, it was a fairly quick read.

Premise

This book picks up after the first book and immediately has some action towards the beginning. I don’t want to go into detail about the whole world building, you can read the first book for that. Review here.

The general idea of it is there is a prince in exile. If he reveals who he is, he will probably be killed. In the second book, he is trying to dismantle the system that lead to the destruction of his home country.

One thing I didn’t love in the first book was how because he was a prince, he was raised with the best tutors and always had a way to win no matter the conflict. It was hard to relate to someone who just made everything work. The second book still has some of that, but there are plenty of times when he is working through something and his actions have dire consequences. It was good to see something like that happen because it rarely happened in the first book.

Plot

It took me several chapters to figure out the plot, but once I did I was hooked. It essentially has three stories happening at the same time. It took me much longer than I’d like to admit to become aware of that. The book wasn’t hiding it or anything, I was just confused for several chapters about who particular characters were. I went to the back of the book to the glossary, and that sort of explained it to me.

The plot is essentially Vis on a mission to destroy a bad guy who keeps doing these cataclysm events every couple hundred years. What makes it dicey is that he started this mission right about the time when another cataclysm should be happening, so he is somewhat racing the clock on this.

Comparisons

I thought this was a well written book, that was a bit of a thriller. If I wanted to read something like this: Red Rising (from what I’ve been told) and the author’s other book series. Maybe, maybe Harry Potter. He is a little exiled boy who has to figure out how to fit in the world he is thrust into, but that’s where the similarities end. Both fantasy, but different styles of books.