Allegiance

Allegiance
Cayla Kluver
490 pages
Publisher: HarelquinTeen
Source: NetGalley
★★★☆☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

ALERT: This review may contain spoilers to the first novel, Legacy.  You can see my review for that book here.

Allegiance picks up where Legacy left off: Alera has married the wrong man and has become Queen Alera of Hytanica.  Soon, the stressful atmosphere between Hytancia and Cokyrian comes to ahead and they are engaged in war.  Alera's sister is abducted and she along with King Steldor must get things in order before something even worse happens.

When I read Legacy over the summer I didn't know how to feel about it.  I feel a little more definitive about Allegiance, however.  The book, like it's predecessor, was long and bogged down with a lot of details, but it did manage to hold my interest over all - if only for the fact that I wanted to see how Alera's marriage was going to work out.  The tone of Allegiance was different from Legacy; it was much more serious and less frivolous.  There were far fewer parties.

About the love triangle - in the first novel I felt for sure that Alera had married the wrong man, but during Allegiance I felt a little differently.  Since she was of sound mind when she made the decision, I felt it was her duty to follow up on it.  I was rooting for her to actually fall a little bit in love with Steldor; I didn't want it to be head over heels because that wouldn't be realistic, but Alera put no effort into the relationship at all. She completely ignored her wifely duties in all aspects of the phrase "wifely duties," and that bothered me.

Three stars - I liked it and for someone who doesn't generally like the fantasy genre at all, that's actually saying something good.  If you like fantasy, check the series out.  Allegiance will be out February 28th.