The Perilous Sea - Sherry Thomas (Elemental Trilogy #2)

Ah, the second book in a trilogy.  A difficult hurdle to overcome, indeed.  The characters and their motivations have already been established; the conflict has begun but the big battle isn't going to happen until the final book.  So what do you do to propel them from the end of the first book to the beginning of the third book?

You give your characters amnesia, of course.  Well, not "of course."  There are plenty of trilogies that go about without anyone getting amnesia.  But when your two main characters have already fallen in love and are well on their way to taking down the Big Bad, what easier way to set them back than to dump them in the desert and wipe their memories?

And so we find our heroes at the beginning of The Perilous Sea.  Don't get me wrong, it's not all amnesia here.  The book is actually divided into two parts: the "amnesia in the desert" part and the part that preceded it, with chapters alternating between the two.  Titus and Iolanthe are then simultaneously stuck in the Sahara with the agents of Atlantis closing in on them and with no idea who they are or why they're there, and also struggling with revelations regarding Titus' fellow Exile Wintervale, who appears to have become a powerful elemental mage in his own right and might be poised to take Iolanthe's spot as Chosen One from her, which throws a bit of a wrench into the dynamic between her and Titus.  Awkward.

Overall, though, I don't think this was quite as tight as The Burning Sky was.  Much of the action here was dispersed in little segments that took about three minutes to read, and were broken up by longer chunks in which Iolanthe and Titus sniped at each other or made out.  The awesome world of the Crucible was largely absent until the end of the book, and while I got a handle on what was up with Wintervale fairly early on, not much happened with it until the end when everything started to come together.  There also appeared to be some gaps left hanging at the end; for example, if Titus was related to the person who made the blood circle and yet Iolanthe was not, doesn't that mean that who made it wasn't actually who they thought it was?  Why were Titus and Iolanthe's memories wiped, since it doesn't seem like Titus could have met the contact threshold that the memory spell required and Iolanthe probably couldn't have either?  There seemed to be several conflicts within the logic here, and unless I missed something bit, it seems like there were holes that were never resolved but were made out to be to the characters' satisfaction, which doesn't seem to sit right in my head.

Titus and Iolanthe also fall into the insta-love category in this book with their memories wiped, which was a little eye-roll worthy.  In the first book, they were definitely attracted to each other but actual love took longer.  This time, they basically lay eyes on each other and want to make out even though neither can be sure the other isn't trying to kill them.  For a while I pondered the possibility that Titus wasn't actually Titus and there was going to be a third party throwing a wrench into things, but nope.

This didn't necessarily feel like a middle book in a trilogy.  Things still happened and while the pacing wasn't necessarily even, it definitely wasn't stalled in place like many second books.  But the book was definitely flawed, though in different ways than the first one.  Still, it ended on a resounding note and I'm really looking forward to reading the third and final book in this trilogy.

3.5 stars out of 5.