Taken as a whole, Shadow’s Edge takes everything (the good and the bad) of the first Night Angel book and cranks it up even further. On the plus side, the good becomes even better. It was hard to put this book down. On the down side, a lot of the first part of the book where Kylar tries to run from his powers and live a normal life is honestly fairly boring. Luckily it picks back up and really goes crazy by the end.

There are storylines all over the place. The all manage to tie together more or less, so I don’t particularly mind, but there are a few that I feel probably could have been cut to make a tighter story. Kylar’s story is interesting, obviously enough, as is that of Vi and the Godking. Sister Ariel’s story I feel could actually carry a story of its own and directly relates to the others. Logan’s time in the Hole is fascinating, but seemed to drag on forever (which I guess could have been intentional). But the storyline about the prostitute’s rebellion? All that about the Ubersword of DESTINY? I trust that eventually they’ll pay off. But within the context of this single story, the feel weird.

There is still a lot of obsession with sex that will certainly appeal to the teen male demographic of the book. It felt out of character for the time period / style of the book at times, but for the most part, I just skipped by it.

Characterwise, I’m liking Kylar a lot more, especially once he gets back to being the Night Angel. I don’t particularly like how suddenly godly he’s become, especially compared to pretty much everyone in the book.

After that, I really liked the character of Sister Ariel. Like I mentioned before, It think she could actually carry a book by herself. She reminds me a lot of the better parts of the Wheel of Time.

One character that surprised me how much I enjoyed reading was Vi. She really grew and changed throughout the book and I like just how snarky she can me. I wasn’t a fan of how quickly she got ‘better’ towards the end, but … magic I guess?

Worldbuildingwise, the magic systems are fascinating. We learn a bit more about the vir, but we still don’t know everything. Weeks has managed to make it feel like a well defined, rule based magic system while at the same time keeping things mysterious enough for both the reader and many of the characters that magic still feels, well, magical.

Overall, an excellent book. Worth the read.

Holy crap that epilogue.

Side note: Take a few minutes and read the top rated reviews on Goodreads. For a book with an overall 4.27 rating, there are a quite a few who really hated this book. People are interesting.