Review: Burning Kingdoms by Lauren DeStefano

Title: Burning Kingdoms (The Internment Chronicles #2)
Author: Lauren DeStefano
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Release date: March 10th 2015
Source: Edelweiss
Format: eARC

Rating: 2.5/5

Buy on: Amazon | B&N | BookDepository

You can read my review of Perfect Ruin - here

Danger descends in the second book of The Internment Chronicles, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Chemical Garden trilogy.

After escaping Internment, Morgan and her fellow fugitives land on the ground to finally learn about the world beneath their floating island home.

The ground is a strange place where water falls from the sky as snow, and people watch moving pictures and visit speakeasies. A place where families can have as many children as they want, their dead are buried in vast gardens of bodies, and Internment is the feature of an amusement park.

It is also a land at war.

Everyone who fled Internment had their own reasons to escape their corrupt haven, but now they’re caught under the watchful eye of another king who wants to dominate his world. They may have made it to the ground, but have they dragged Internment with them?

I liked Perfect Ruin and I was eager to read its sequel, as the previous book had ended with a cliffhanger, which had left me hooked and wanted to know what had happened to Morgan and the people that fled with her. But the truth is that Burning Kingdoms bored me, mainly due to the extremely slow pace and rather anti-climactic plot.

Besides the main character irritated me, because in the first book she spends her time dreaming of the world below (since she lived in a city floating in the sky) and as soon she fulfilled hers mission and escape Internment and reach the below (aka earth), a land at war, she spends her time missing her floating city.

The plot leaves much to be desired, since despite being 320 pages, not much happens of relevance and it sort of lost the magic that had the first book - I liked the idea of a floating city - because this book takes place an alternate world that reminds me a lot of earth in the 20's, as we see silent films and other details that reminded me of that time.

Overall, I didn´t enjoyed Burning Kingdoms as much as its predecessor, it definitely suffered from second book syndrome, in truth I was very disappointed because the plot was lacking.