The inventive language of the first volume has petered out in this one, but the plot ticks along satisfactorily, with event and pageantry and an ambiguous conclusion.
There's one very odd thing in the plot. The heroine did a terrible, destructive, stupid thing in the second volume, against clear instructions from a reliable source. I don't think she's ever chastised for it. She does suffer another haunted hike through thorny jungles, as in the first volume; maybe that's the sentence, but it isn't an obvious penance like that of, say, Psyche. I would have expected the bereaved survivors of the disaster to tell her off, especially since they have to slog along with her.
The oddity in the telling is an exhaustion in retelling. She's still using a good tasty stew of mostly-Irish fairytales as her figured background, but two of them, 's Goblin Market most noticeably, appear as tales told by other characters. Rossetti's wonderful Tale is long out of copyright and easily available, but Dart-Thornton gives it back in truncated and imitative prose; not an improvement.
ISBN: 0446528072
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