A World Without Princes (#2)

by Soman Chainani

Date Read: 11/17/16
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

I’m going to start by talking about the length of this book. It was over 400 pages. Do you know how heavy that is to carry back and forth from work? How hard it is to keep a book that size opened and on the correct page while you’re eating lunch? I lugged this sucked around for WEEKS because my only reading time is during my lunch break at work these days (I love my 2-year-old to pieces, but she definitely has drastically changed my life)!

There were times I felt like this book kind of dragged on…but that’s easy to do when you’re 400+ pages. About 300 pages in I was ready for answers. I had a wait a little longer until things started piecing together and much longer for Agatha to put it all together. However, the positive to the length of these books is that nothing feels instantaneous. There is NO insta-anything. Everything is very believable through both books.

I also felt like I was able to relate to Sophie a little more in this book. Or at least I understood her motives more in this book than the first. I couldn’t stand her in the first one. I still don’t condone what she did, but at least she had good intentions (for herself anyway). The only thing I wasn’t happy about was how long it took for Agatha to figure it out. Sure, it had more impact having her make the realization at that point, but as the reader who has known since the beginning of the book, it was super frustrating. It would have almost been better if this book was told only from Agatha’s POV and we hadn’t known.

I also wasn’t a fan of how quickly Agatha and Tedros lost trust for each other. And did the honestly never think Sophie’s name when the mentioned the pink spell? I mean, honestly!

I did enjoy Agatha’s relationship with the witches. I really enjoyed every time the 4 of them got together. It also showed that good and evil can work together. There are blurred lines. Not everyone is black or white.

I thought it was an interesting concept that the towers of Good and Evil became Girls and Boys. It was also interesting how quickly they hated each other – though I suppose if I was evicted as rudely as the boys were, I’d be pretty upset also.

I think the concept that the author is working around about love vs friendship is so unique. Everyone always thinks you can’t have these best friends anymore once you get married. I love one of my best guy friends when I got married. So I’m really interested to see how this works out in the end.

I’ve really enjoyed the concept and I enjoy most of the characters. The world is super interesting. Looking forward to what is in store for Agatha and Sophie in the final installment.