Melina Shield maneuvers things so that the artifacts Vallora took are sent for study to New Kelvin, with Melina as the understudy. The group must stop her. Lots of politic'ing and kind of sad. Firekeeper finds out a bit of history from the Royals about Royal/Human interaction. In the end Firekeeper has to give up what she wants and tries to please both humans and Royals. She's the one stuck in the middle. ( )

An excellent book in a very good series, It is always fun to find a series like this after it has become mature or completed. Some of the books were in my collection and the rest are in libraries, so there is much good reading ahead. Characters are evolving nicely and the built world grows in an interesting fashion. Magic is stifled,some villains are dispatched and others lurk. Early family linkages seem to be coming powerful partnerships. ( )

FINALLY done with this one.

Much tighter than the first in the series (the quest plot structure is inherently easier to write), and was fairly high-tension for much of the book, but so much of the writing was just... bog-like. The plot itself is pretty clearly an action story, but the writing is downright meditative -- clearly this author is highly confused over what she wants to write.

There are also an alarming density of awkwardly-placed dialogue-tags -- such that they ACTIVELY INTERFERE WITH THE MEANING OF THE DIALOGUE.

Ultimately, I'm left with the feeling that this book is in sore need of a vicious editor with a love of the Red Pen. Trim all the paragraphs of unnecessary or repetitive exposition, and hey! Turns out this is actually a 500-page book.

Mainly giving it three stars to show the vast improvement from the prequel, but I don't care nearly enough to pick up the next in the series, even if it were to fall out of the sky and onto my bookshelf. Not going to waste another month of my life feeling irritated with an editor for being too nice. (That, or sorry for an editor that they had to deal with whatever the manuscript looked like BEFORE their editing cleaned it up even this much.) ( )

Like the first in the series, Wolf's Head, Wolf's Heart is pretty well-written and has some really neat worldbuilding. Nonetheless, I did not love it, nor did I hate it. They fall in the realm of just above meh. For one thing, they could be shorter; there are some repetitions, often in relation to Firekeeper and Blind Seer, which I could do without.

The larger problem though is what I pointed out in my review of the first: action is minimal and so is romance. Pretty much all of the drama is political. That's done well, but just does not enthrall me. If some more of the others were woven within it, then perhaps I would find this series as delightful as I had hoped.

The characters, too, have yet to grow on me. They are consistent across the first two books, which is almost unfortunate, since none of them do I love. I like a couple okay, but I'm certainly not invested in their fates.

The meeting of the Royal Beasts was pretty laughable, so I have to mention it. This tribunal was supposed to be monumental and somber, but the way the animals interacted was absurd. To prevent one character monologuing for pages, she had them trade off telling the story in an awkward, arbitrary manner, reminding me of nothing so much as passing reading stories aloud in an elementary school classroom.

Since I have five of the six books in the series, I will be slogging forward, and I do have some hopes of improvement, but they are definitively not high hopes. If you like political machinations and epic fantasy, this is for you! ( )

Like the first book in the series, Jane Lindskold had delivered adequate fantasy in a nicely imagined world. Nevertheless the story didn't quite grab me and draw me in. ( )