** spoiler alert ** 
 I really expected to enjoy this book, and it certainly met my expectations. Where I think I ended up giving Passenger a 3.5 for uneven pacing, the pacing of Wayfarer was just right. I enjoyed the adventures and the settings of this one even more than the first. 
 Nicholas is the best YA hero I've read in a long time (maybe ever). He's noble, sensitive, selfless, wise, tough, determined, and compassionate. His love for Etta and his internal moral compass make me swoon. But he's not too good to be true, somehow, because he makes mistakes and struggles with self doubt. He's the full package. In the first book, I felt that the issue of his race occasionally lacked some deftness (would a black man traveling through Victorian Paris or in the bomb shelters of WWII London with a white girl really blend in as well as he did with just a sidelong glance?), but in this book, I bought it all. 
 Etta was a fine heroine, but I wasn't as invested in her as I should have been. I'll admit that her family dynamics left me a bit confused. She accepts her father almost at once, and I kept thinking there was going to be a twist of his character, but he seems to be the real deal all the way to the end. It's a relief since she already had enough drama in her life, but I guess their insta-bond felt a bit anticlimactic to me. I wasn't clear as to why Rose had to do some of the bad things she'd done, especially killing Alice, and somehow when they all saw the shiny Big Bad Guy, Henry and Etta were just okay with everything. I know she had to protect the astrolabe, but I missed something there. The flashbacks to Rose's childhood made me think we were supposed to pity Rose, but while some characters loved her and some hated her, I was just a bit baffled by her. I'm sure there was more to their family dynamics that I would get with a second read-through, but their intersecting stories paled to me beside Nicholas's adventures. 
 One other complaint I had with the first book was that there was so much build-up of Etta's musical talent that I spent a good deal of Passenger distracted by the fact that she wasn't acting like a professional musician. It had been a couple months since reading that when I started Wayfarer, so I came in to this one happy to accept that she's a time-traveling, adventurous heroine who happens to play the violin. The mentions of her musical talent (particularly the lovely scene where she and Henry play together for the tsar) worked in this novel! 
 The romance in this book is compelling, even though they're not even in the same location for the vast majority of the book. I didn't think the consummation of their relationship was necessary in the 1st book, and this one proved me right. If Nicholas and Etta are soul mates, and they definitely are, we don't need them jumping in bed together or making out for hundreds of pages to savor their relationship. I loved the maturity of their love story. When Nicholas is considering the consequences of destroying the astrolabe, he's not just thinking of sacrificing himself for the good of his beloved (ho hum, we've read that a million times)--he realizes that he's going to have to sacrifice their inter-time relationship and her happiness as well as his for the good of well, mankind, I guess. Just as he'd rather lose Etta than blacken his soul with murder, he has the maturity to realize that it's better for them to be separated by the centuries than for the evil and suffering caused by misuse of the astrolabe to continue. Nicholas and Etta earn their angst, unlike many of the shallow insta-love couples we see all over in YA. I don't know how the general teenage population is going to respond to their romance, but this married mother of four found it deeply satisfying. 
 I knew this was a fantasy world in which people can time travel, but the immortal bad guy (and witch) threw me for a loop at first. The Belladonna's trick on Nicholas definitely upped the stakes for him (and can I just swoon again at how noble he is?), but I wasn't expecting this book to add in more magic. This isn't a complaint, it's just a comment that Bracken took the worldbuilding in a direction that surprised me, and I guess the effect for me was to make Grandfather Ironwood less scary once there was a bigger, badder, Bad Guy. 
 Because this is the era of #weneeddiversebooks, Bracken has not one, but two side-same-sex-romances. In Sophia's case, shrugging off her proclaimed love for Julian at the beginning of this book and casually announcing to Nicholas that she prefers girls felt off to me. Would an 18th century man like Nicholas really just be, "oh, huh, okay" about Sophia and Li Min? Don't buy it. Likewise the Ironwood guardian in Carthage referring to his "husband" seemed historically sketchy--I thought no one but Etta had traveled past 1945, so is this an alternative timeline where we have gay marriage prior to the 20th century? 
 Other than those issues, I found the historical settings believable and compelling. The segregated hospital that Etta and Julian encounter in the alternate-1939 NYC was tragically realistic. Maybe reading this over MLK Jr weekend heightened that for me, but I appreciated how this is what it took to get through to Julian, after the overt and casual racism he's lived out with Nicholas over the years. (I liked that their relationship is always going to be complicated--it's more realistic than a brotherly happily-ever-after.) The siege of Carthage felt vivid and real. I could go on, but I must truly commend Bracken for her attention to detail throughout the historical adventures.