2.5/5 
 I finished the first book less than a week ago, feeling sort of meh about it. I hoped this would be better. In some ways it was- we were introduced to other types of magic, which interested me quite a bit. And the pacing of this story is better. I think her characters still need work. 
 Ceony is just so boring- she's just more of a Mary Sue than the last book. She's frustrated when it takes her four attempts to get something right, because its never taken her that long to learn something. She's great at cooking, learning, performing spells, everything. Her one 'flaw' is her hydrophobia. She also displays casual sexism based on the types of clothing women wear- never men. She's incredibly annoying in that, despite being only a few months into her apprenticeship, she thinks she knows better than everyone else, and only she can save the day. Not the dozens of other, more accomplished magicians she's surrounded by. Nope, she's the only one. Which causes her to rush into the stupidest situations ever, and put everyone else in danger. 
 The other characters aren't much better- in the last book, the villain is Lira, who Ceony defeats after doing some impossible magic. Lira didn't seem to have much motivation besides killing Emery, Ceony's mentor/love interest and Lira's ex-husband. She also cackled a lot. This time, the villain is Grath Cobalt, whose motivations seem to be unfreezing Lira and changing the material he's bonded to. There's also Saraj, the foreign magician who just wants to kill everyone. Actually, when Ceony sees him, she's suspicious of him because he's a foreigner (either Arab or Indian- because those two are the same thing). But its ok to be casually racially profiling, because her suspicions are correct. Both Saraj and Grath are equally undeveloped and boring. 
 In the end, Ceony saves the day by performing magic that she stumbled upon by accident. (view spoiler)[ She 'unbonds' from paper and binds to glass, and defeats Grath in order to save the day. (hide spoiler)] Part of the reason this series was so interesting was because of some of the basic tenets of magic established at the beginning of the first book. The fact that Ceony manages to overcome this so easily just seems like the easy way out. Also, I refuse to believe that nobody else in the entire history of magic hasn't thought to try this method, because it seems pretty simple. 
 Long story short, this book has a lot of potential- the writing style itself is elegant, and the book has so much potential. It falls very short of what it could be due to poor characterization.