In this follow-up to The Sin Eater’s Daughter, a fairy tale has come to life. The Sleeping Prince is awake, and is taking multiple kingdoms for his throne after five hundred years asleep. He’s brutal, and the world is in chaos. Errin is struggling to survive as the battle approaches. Her father is dead, her brother has disappeared, and her mother seems to have turned into another beast from the fairy tales. The only person she can trust is a man whose face she has never seen, and even then, she counts on betrayal.

You never know with second books how well they’ll come out in comparison to the first in a series. The Sleeping Prince happily goes the way of being just as brilliant. The story is told through a different narrator’s eyes, though characters from the last book do show up now and then, more or less. (Can’t say more without spoilers.) There is more about the world, history, and magic of this series, and a great setup for the next book. There were surprises that I predicted ahead of time, and surprises that I never saw coming. Let me just say that the ambiguous ending from the first book gets cleared up quite nicely!

My favorite thing about the series so far, I think, is the multitude of grey characters. There are some characters that I still can’t tell their alliances. Great construction of intrigue and neutrality. I’m already coming up with theories for the people and plot to come!

Performance: Once again, Amy Shiels does an absolutely fantastic job with the narration!