18. Glass Sword - Victoria Aveyard

Red Queen #2
Library Book
2016 Harper Teen
444 pgs.
YA Fantasy
Finished March 13, 2016
Goodreads rating: 4.11
My rating: 4

First line/s:  "I flinch.  The rag she gives me is clean, but it still smells of blood.  I shouldn't care.  I already have blood all over my clothes.  The red in mine, of course.  The silver belongs to many others."

My comments:  Well.  I couldn't believe how unhappy with this book I was at the beginning.  Just couldn't get into it.  Went back and started over, tried again.  Once I got through the first quarter or so, I was more into it, and by the last quarter couldn't put it down.  I think what might have "gotten" me was that, unlike a lot of sequels, Aveyard wrote it to read as if there were no huge gap (of the reader's time) between books one and two.  To enjoy what was going on you had to have perfect recall of every happenstance and character from the first book....and I didn't.  It had been too long. No hints or reminders as to who or what some of the mentioned people were.  SOOOOOOOOOOO - NOTE TO SELF - when the next title appears way down the road, read the last third or quarter of this book as a refresher immediately before reading the new.  (I also wasn't that crazy about the setting, some of the characters, and what went on in the first hundred or so pages! Not sure why.....)

Goodreads synopsis:  Mare Barrow’s blood is red—the color of common folk—but her Silver ability, the power to control lightning, has turned her into a weapon that the royal court tries to control. 
          The crown calls her an impossibility, a fake, but as she makes her escape from Maven, the prince—the friend—who betrayed her, Mare uncovers something startling: she is not the only one of her kind.
          Pursued by Maven, now a vindictive king, Mare sets out to find and recruit other Red-and-Silver fighters to join in the struggle against her oppressors. 
          But Mare finds herself on a deadly path, at risk of becoming exactly the kind of monster she is trying to defeat. 
          Will she shatter under the weight of the lives that are the cost of rebellion? Or have treachery and betrayal hardened her forever?
          The electrifying next installment in the Red Queen series escalates the struggle between the growing rebel army and the blood-segregated world they’ve always known—and pits Mare against the darkness that has grown in her soul.