☕️🩸A Steeping of Blood🩸☕️

• Hafsah Faizal

⭐️⭐️

This is the sequel to Hafsah Faizal’s A Tempest of Tea, which I didn’t love, but (because I have a pathological inability to DNF a series) I continued with this one, with hopes it would be better!  We pick up where we left off at the cliffhanger at the end of Tempest. Arthie Casimir, now a fully-flegded vampire, must reassemble her crew, scattered across the wreckage of White Roaring. Reeling from the burning of Spindrift and everything she’s worked towards, Arthie must now confront the ghosts of her past, and journey to the island where she was born, and died. 

The book attempts to tackle some incredibly heavy and complex themes, such as colonialism and racism, but all of the messaging felt rather on the nose. Colonialism = bad, and that was pretty much it. I understand it’s YA, but I feel like we need to have more respect for young adult readers! They can comprehend heavy themes, and it doesn’t always need to be oversimplified. Additionally, a pet peeve of mine was the switching of inner voices within one POV. We would be in Arthie’s chapter, but all of a sudden, we’re in Jin’s POV. 

I love Flick so much! She absolutely stole the show for me. I did love the ending too – it felt very right and fitting and was the perfect conclusion to the duology. I also enjoyed seeing more of the world in Ceylon, than just confined to White Roaring. 

Overall, it wasn’t one of my favourite reads. However, I absolutely adored Hafsah’s first duology, We Hunt the Flame, so I will 100% be reading anything she writes next – I think this particular duology was just a miss for me. 

Thank you to @panmacmillan and @netgalley for the advanced copy! A Steeping of Blood is out now!