Rating: 1.5/5 
 ***Minor spoilers + spoilers for book one*** 
 Meira, now queen of Winter and the royal conduit herself is struggling to hold her kingdom together. King Noam is a constant threat and will not stop making it known that he holds power over her kingdom. After searching several mines, the Winterians have uncover the entrance to the chasm and it appears that three keys are required to open it. When Theron tells Noam of their discovery even though Meira begs him not to, she is dragged in along a journey to uncover the keys to unlock the chasm. However, Meira doesn't want the keys to open the chasm - she wants to hide them from Theron, who will do anything to make his dream of a united Primoria real. 
 I found this book a pretty big disappointment. While I didn't think Snow Like Ashes was spectacular, I saw a good start to a fantasy series and was excited to continue on with this book. I expected action, evil scheming, and a badass Meira. What I got was action in the last 20 pages or so, evil scheming that was pretty obvious throughout the book, and a Meira who was too busy contemplating political things to even carry a weapon. 
 My main issue with this book was how boring it was. It only started getting relatively interesting after about 400 pages of politics. Meira was pressured that her people wanted a real queen rather than a warrior queen, and she listened and didn't even carry her chakram around anymore. Those first 400 pages were filled with Meira coming to get used to her queenly duties, figuring out how to get political allies, and trying to figure out how to get the best result without angering the other kingdoms. While I know that there had to be strategy in getting allies and all that, politics wasn't all I wanted to read about. I wanted the action and the warrior queen, and both of those were taken away from me. 
 On top of that, I found that the characters were being quite annoying as well. Mather seemed extremely bitter in this book and jealous over Meira and Theron even though he wasn't even trying to spend time with Meira. I found that he blamed Meira for not coming to see him when he could have just as well gone to see her. He kept making rash decisions without thinking of how they could affect other people, and there were consequences for that. He refused to look at the bigger picture. Meira was also less likeable in this book for the previous reasons and I found that she couldn't really hold her own. I know she's new at being queen but she's letting herself get pushed around by Cordell and the other kingdoms. I feel like she should have felt more confident in herself, or at least put on a display of confidence. 
 Overall, this book was quite disappointing and nothing interesting happened until the very end, and even then it was pretty predictable. While I'll probably pick up the third book when it comes out because I'm curious to know where the series will be heading, it isn't very high up on my priority list anymore. If you plan to read this book, go in prepared to enjoy it less than book one in the series.