Blood and Ash Series: Book #2, A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire

Plot Summary: Poppy (Penellaphe) is faced with the startling reality that the man she was falling in love with is actually her sworn enemy: Casteel Da’Neer the Prince of Atlantia. He plans to use her to retrieve his brother who is being tortured by Solis, but very quickly their feelings for one another complicate things. As they struggle to work together they learn that there are machinations at work that go beyond what either of them could imagine. 

Soft spoilers ahead:

A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire is the second book in the Blood and Ash series and also the one I prefer least of all. Everything that I found enjoyable or interesting about the first book is no longer present in this one. I’m going to try to keep this brief because I don’t enjoy being negative, but sometimes you just gotta let it out. Ya know?

Okay, no more stalling. Here it goes! I’m doing it….ugh. This book is lazy writing at its absolute finest. The world building and plot are dumped on you with all the grace of a falling elephant. Penellaphe is labeled as ‘the cheeky girl who asks a lot of questions’ and this is just a way to feed the reader information without having us/Poppy earn it. If she’s confused about something then she just asks someone and if they don’t know then she asks someone else. Essentially, everyone is like a walking Google search. 

I would have much rather preferred Poppy to work for the information gained. What I mean by this is that usually, characters will actively struggle to figure out a mystery with some sort of payoff in return. Whether that means they spend time digging through library archives, follow an ambiguous lead, or they uncover a hidden map that they need to decipher. My point is, the information is eventually revealed to them after they have overcome some sort of hurdle, emotional or physical, and earned it.

As a result of Poppy simply asking questions, there doesn’t seem to be any real tension or stakes. At least, to me, that is. 

Big spoilers ahead:

My other issue with this book is that ¾ of it is spent with Poppy and Casteel banging in a bedroom. And while I have no qualms with sex scenes...it felt like the story took a back seat and the romance took center stage. Which, like I said, usually wouldn’t be a problem...but this is supposed to be the second book in a fantasy epic. You typically would expect to thoroughly explore the new worlds around them instead of spending such a huge portion of time in a solitary room.

Yes, Casteel and Poppy fight their way through a forest of cannibals to get to that bedroom, but the skirmish is over so quickly that their danger never feels truly great and we never explore the cannibals further. 

A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire feels largely like a filler book. It suffers from, what I like to call “second book syndrome”, a disease that commonly plagues sequels in a larger series. You have read a sequel like this if it spends entirely too long explaining the world around the protagonist rather than showing you that world, and the sequel also lacks some major quality that was present in the first book. A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire could have been great if it just showed rather than told the reader. I love the three main characters: Casteel, Poppy, and Kieran because they all have genuinely entertaining conversations (although they do tend to have repetitive dialogue and catch phrases; I digress) and curious sexual tension. To further discuss some positives, I appreciate the magic system and how Poppy uses it to read emotions. There is also an ongoing joke about an erotic book that a character read and I laughed every time it was hinted at or when that character was teased….but that’s about it.

My Review: 2.5/5

Note: Book #3 Review will be live by the end of this following week!