After having really enjoyed The Fifth Season, I was very eager to read the sequel. The worldbuilding is still solid here, but the plotting and pacing just don't hold my interest the way they did in the first book. After finishing it, I still feel like very little happened until the end of the book. Spoilers below for The Fifth Season. 
 Still, there's good stuff here. We're introduced to Nassun, Essun's daughter, and her perspective mainly involves struggling with her increasingly unstable father (who murdered her infant brother), forming a bond with an erratic Guardian, and learning to use magic all on her own. It's never really clear what her part of the story is for, though - Nassun is being manipulated by old men of various sorts, but the reasons for that are always a bit fuzzy to me, even at the very end. She's also very metacognitive, in a way I wouldn't expect of an eleven year-old - constantly musing explicitly on the nature of emotions and cognition and social relationships in a way that feels very abstract. Still, fairly interested to see what place she'll have in the world. 
 There's also Essun, who remains in the underground city of Castrima. She spends most of her time split between comm drama and learning things from a dying Alabaster, and though there's some pretty interesting worldbuilding and a bit of character development that gets done here, it isn't until her very last chapter that I felt like things were actually developing and changing. 
 So all in all, while this wasn't a bad book - I still read it pretty quickly, hoping to get to something good - it feels quite sparse. I strongly get the impression this book is mostly setup for the end of the trilogy, which is reasonable I suppose. And what it does set up will probably be really, really exciting and interesting - a lot of big pieces get moved into interesting places. But I still feel a bit let down coming off the first book. 
 Definitely going to have to finish this trilogy, though!