Lodestone - book two: The World of Ice and Stars by Mark Whiteway

My review of Lodestone - book one: The Sea of Storms can be found here

WARNING: This review contains slight spoilers for the first book

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The desperate race to save a world continues. Washed up on a distant shore on the unknown side of her planet, together with the Chandara Boxx, the orphan Kelanni named Shann must uncover the fate of her companions, whilst searching for an artefact hidden there in the distant past. As she journeys farther into this new land, she will encounter strange sights, come up against new enemies and meet new friends, until finally coming face to face with the truth of her own past.
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As a whole the book has a few glitches, but the story, I think, is so interesting and new that it makes up for that. I still love the lodestone concept and it's taken so much further in this second book. The world and its inhabitants are also explored and explained further and I love the story behind it all and the richness in detail.

The characters feel more evolved in this book and I really liked how they all reacted to their separation from each other. I think the new addition, Rael, could quickly become a favourite of mine.
You get a deeper insight to who they are and why they do what they do and especially Keris is becoming more human, or I should say, Kelanni for every page. It was also really nice to finally be introduced to the humans in the story and learn their side of the tale - it made a lot of things finally make sense, as both the races and the past and present were linked.

I really want to give this books 4 stars but I can't. The way it ends after a long long journey without any real conclusions to anything is just too frustrating. The story was very interesting and I enjoyed the plot throughout the whole book. Maybe the third book in the series will round it up better and if you read it one after the other it would feel more complete and thus it'd get 4 stars. However the third book is not yet available and I'll just have to wait to see what happens (and I must say that I really do look forward to reading it).

 306 pages / published in 2010
Review by Iben Jakobsen, BoB, 2011

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Many thanks goes to author Mark Whiteway for supplying me with a copy of this book for reviewing.