This beast of a book picks up where we left off in the first book. I won't give away any spoilers.

We are still following Ari. He has found himself in yet another bit of trouble. I say bit, but it's life or death.
He is also continuing to tell Eloine his story, and this is my favorite part of the book. The rest is still good, but I love his story. I especially love his time at school. I also enjoy the parts with his found families, the Sparrows, Crows, etc.
I also hope Nitham gets what he deserves.

This book is really good, but not quite as good as the first one. I will definitely pick up the next one. Hopefully it will be soon!

R.R. Viridi is not an author for the folks who want a quick read, but it was very cool to jump back into this highly complex world.

I'll be honest - this second book was a long more meandering than the first and it did lose my attention and focus a bit.

This was good, the prose is so beautiful and lyrical. But the book is just so bloody long and winding, the plot was too meandering and it just didn’t work as well as book 1 for me.

Thanks to Tor Publishing Group and Netgalley for the complimentary ARC. All opinions provided are my own.
Ari returns to his tales of the Ashram and his continued search for the Ashura. He starts searching for the Asir with the hopes the might help him locate and defeat the Ashura.

About a third of the way through the story takes a detour as Ari joins a group of thieves in a new city. It felt unnecessary at first. It had too many similarities to prior arcs. Thankfully it ends strong. Sadly, it leads right into a section with incredibly slow pacing.

Ari joins a caravan traveling across the desert and meets a new group of characters. This section felt slow and almost became a slog. Though it builds to an interesting conflict, it repeats the cycle in the next section.

The plot is strongest when it references key points from the first book and ties things together. Though we continue to learn more about the bindings and the mysterious forces of the world, it is similar to the first book. Nothing matches the intensity of the highlights from the prior book.

The dual story structure is difficult to follow because we have such long breaks between sections set in the present. It is easy to forget what happened during the long flashbacks. Given the slower pace, many will likely read shorter books as breaks, stretching it out further.

Those who enjoy the deep focus on Ari will find more of that here. It could have done more to signal what to expect with the next volume and build that expectation. I worry that the series won't be able to maintain the momentum. I don't feel a deep desire to find out how the story ends.

Review to come. Did not realize this is book 2 in a series. Will read and review after finishing The Last Binding.

I did not like The First Binding, but it had promise, so I cautiously tried Doors of Midnight. Unfortunately, it's worse. Virdi uses even more words to say nothing, and I was left impossibly bored.

This book continues Book 1, almost no reminders of who is who, we're just back in the story. Recommend to read back-to-back if possible.

Everything everyone loved about Book 1 is back, this really is just a continuation of the same story. The prose is still poetic, but certain trends seem emphasized. Several times in this book, the wants and needs of silences, noises, the silence "belongs to the crowd", this idea pops up enough times to stand out.

The plot moves on, our hero, Ari, is living his present-day life, and stops sometimes to tell his life story to a nice lady, and in that story people will often tell a different story. This story-within-a-story format is easy enough to follow, no weird Inception confusion, but does allow for some interesting "fourth wall breaks" where one story bleeds into another. Like in A Princess Bride, when the story in the book comes back to the story in the bedroom. A convenience at times, but an interesting writing technique. Maybe 40-50 stories total in this book, told by all the characters.

We also get some patterns that I think are the result of a young man telling his own story… every girl is hot and wants to bang him, he's pretty awesome all the time, even his mistakes are just simple mistakes and not actual character flaws. This book reads like The Voyages of Sinbad, dramatic event follows dramatic event, there's no time for character development. Ari is the same person the whole story. He's always the good guy who does things for the right reason and never gives up. He's got an interesting story, but he's a little boring after 1600 pages now. I mean, he recreates Batman based on first principles, he gets his own orphan Robin and everything.

Speaking of Batman, this book continues the pattern of similar scenes and plot points from other books. I can't believe this much similarities are accidental. There's a DIY magical weapon I read about years ago in The Dresden Files, I can imagine that is just parallel thinking and nobody ripped off anybody else. But the coping from Name of the Wind is just too obvious to feel good about. There are parts of this book that are so original and creative but I'm distracted by the similarities.

Even when Virdi does better than Name of the Wind, I'm not excited about it. Our hero follows a secret door through to a magical land with a sexy lady and must survive by his wits and chutzpah, time moves weird in this magical land so he comes back from where few men to come back with new knowledge to advance his revenge fetish. But I think Virdi does a great job of keeping Ari's magical-land vacation from getting sexual or even romantic, the story keeps it "realistic" in how a person and a god interact, as weird as a statement as it is.

Even as retelling of Name of the Wind, this is still a great story. The emphasis on plot and action don't allow for as much character development as I would like, but this story is good enough to still be a great story or fifty.

6/10

I absolutely loved The First Binding, the first book in this series, and while many of then reasons I loved it carry over into the sequel overall it did not live up to its predecessor in my opinion.

My biggest complaint is just that the book is too long. "Now you may be asking didn't I just see you give Rhythm of War a 9/10, that book is significantly longer than this one?" You would be correct in that, but this book FELT longer. There are many long passages that are overly verbose and seem to drag for far longer than they need to. When I reached the end of this book and asked myself what all happened throughout it I cam to the realization that it was far less than you would expect for a book of this length. Now some of this is due to the prose used throughout the book, and as I said with The First Binding this can be one of the greatest strengths of these novels. The prose is so poetic and grand. At times this makes everything seem all the more magic, but unfortunately in this entry it also made things seem to drag at times.

Another thing that I want to note though is that many descriptions throughout the book, most notably those of eye color, are UNPARALLED in anything else I have ever read. You will never hear that someone's eyes are brown, instead you will be told that they "held a gleam like candlelight within their rum-brightened brown" or "with the deep-set eyes of powdered jade". Many of the descriptions of this book are absolutely beautiful and paint a vivid picture that one can almost see, and that R.R. Virdi should be greatly commended for.

Overall the plot is fine, but as I said I think that it could have been made even better by cutting out some of the unnecessary seeming bits, or at least shortening them. Another thing I would have really liked to see here would be a recap of the first book at the beginning, as it is a complicated story with a lot to remember, and it was many months, and many books, ago when I first read it.

** spoiler alert ** As with the first, the pacing was a bit slow and it seemed to be a bit longer than necessary even for a high fantasy book. I’m enjoying following along Ari’s journey, but there are quite a few tangents along the way.

I hope that this all comes to an epic conclusion soon, which I do hope to read, even though I’m sure it’ll be another 800+ pages.

Thank you R.R. Virdi for a copy of this eARC in exchange for an honest review

If you’re a fan of long whimsical, makes you feel like you’re in that world, sentences then this series is for you! This writing is not for everyone but I thoroughly enjoyed this sequel! It didn’t live up to my full expectations, as I’m rating it 4 stars, but I still loved it!

Doors of Midnight ARC Review

Thank you so much to RR Virdi and Tor books for the opportunity to read and review this book!

Doors of Midnight is a high fantasy novel and book two in the Tales of Tremaine series. As always this review will be spoiler free, so if this seems vague - that’s why. After the events at the end of the first book, The First Binding, Ari continues his story of how he must now continue to grow and learn his magic.

This was another interesting read for me. The world continued to expand and grow within this book as Ari continues to tell his story. Unfortunately, the things I struggled with in the first book continued into this one. It felt tedious and way too wordy. While the characters grew a little bit more, I still didn’t feel like I was attached to any of them

Overall this was a three star read for the world building. I’m still struggling with the length of the books and unnecessarily wordy prose. This book did have some darker moments, so please check triggers if you’re sensitive

If you’re a fan of high fantasy with complex world building, intricate magic systems and interesting storytelling, then absolutely check this one out.

If you read The First Binding, you knew book two would be another beast of beautifully lyrical writing, rich world building and weaved with folklore from around the world. Without question, The Doors of Midnight ticked all those boxes.

We start where we left off in both Ari's past and present, he had just been expelled from the Ashram for nearly burning the place down (past) and thrown in jail for the murder of a prince (present). Consequently, the present storyline takes place entirely in the castle while past-Ari's storyline takes us all over, from the Ashram to the desert to the Shaen world. And in keeping with all we've come to expect from Ari, he has more sass than sense across the board. That said, he does manage to grow a little bit and keep his mouth closed on occasion, such a surprise that even Master Binder, Rishi Ibrahm, is astounded.

It's a little difficult to talk about the book, which is kind of two storylines that will hopefully one day meet, because of course Ari's past is what's influencing his present....well everything. I'm going to try though.

So past-Ari - we have a lot more happening in what are obviously years gone by. I loved seeing the rumours about him growing more and more, the little ways which they changed from what he initially cultivated to what they became. There was more found family for him and even more bad decisions based on his Superman complex but because it's Ari we know it all worked out fine. (Also he's literally telling us the story so that kind of gives away that he wasn't killed for the many things people tried to kill him over.) One thing I loved was the humour we got. Certain moments had me laughing, particularly from Rishi Ibrahm this time. I also think there is a lot more to his background than we've gotten to see yet. There was more Radi and Aram and of course more Shola, king of the story. Yes, there was also Nitham and I think we can all agree he's awful.

Into the desert, I really hope we get more Aisha, Qimari and Khalil. Given all that's gone on with the merchant king, Arfan, I think (and hope) we'll be seeing them again. The part in the desert that I loved, and I shouted about how much I loved it to R.R. Virdi, was Enshae. From the first book we know Ari 'spent one hundred and one nights with Enshae' but now we get to see it and what he learned from his time there. I adored her character and she broke my heart. I massively hope we get to see her again and her world.

Onto present Ari - of course we get to know about all of the above because he is still telling his story to Eloine. They're still going through their push and pull dance of flirtation that even Danil reappears and has something to say about it. Virdi does their relationship so well and you can feel the flirtation, tension and longing between them. I'm not sure I've ever seen two characters totally have each other wrapped around their fingers but still play hard-to-get. I will argue with Eloine on this one but accosting someone quite literally locked up in prison is not the time to sit down like it's storytime. Evidently it was but I'm going to say that probably wouldn't work for just anyone.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. It was a really slow start. I found it kind of confusing in the beginning, but after a couple of chapters, I was hooked and couldn't put it down. Finished pretty quickly after that. I love the premise of the stories and how they work in a different way than you would think. It was so interesting how they made the stories into the kind of focus and how they work. It reminded me of 1001 Nights. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Thank you NetGalley and Tor books for the e-arc!
I have been waiting for the continuation of this series since The First Binding released! The first book was an unbelievable epic fantasy inspired by the silk roads with charming characters and impeccable writing. I am so happy to say the second book brings the same amazing level of quality to the writing and the story continues to be captivating and engaging. Avoiding spoilers but this book focuses heavily on the magic of storytelling and identity.
Verdi’s style of writing is defiantly worth checking out. Upon starting this book, I remembered why I absolutely adored the first book. Different POV’s and timelines throughout the book really make this story pop.

So many books try and fail for these kinds of tropes, but this really does the trick!! Was hooked almost instantly. While I read a lot of books that touch on these themes, this felt fresh and interesting. I often struggle with some of the FMCs, but I really like this take!! The characters are all unique and feel like their own people without being massive cliches which is unfortunately what I run into a lot. Great mix of world building, tension, spice and mystery. Fresh find!

It’s beautifully descriptive. A bit slow for pacing but there’s so much world building and I really enjoy it. The tale seems to take a slow methodical route to weaving the story together. It’s good and Ari is charismatic and full of mischief. I feel like it’s almost missing the build up for the romance with Eloine or I’ve missed a key detail while reading.

This is the second book in the series and it was amazing! It did a wonderful job of building from the first book. The world building in this was top tier and has me so excited for the next book. I loved the magic system.

3.75/5 🌟

The whole experience of reading The Doors of Midnight was a roller coaster. Virdi doesn’t tap into anything truly epic in scope yet with this story but continues an extremely singular and personal journey with some big hills and valleys for Ari and the reader. The hills are knives in the dark, beautifully written conversation in dungeons and shop fronts, and steps into new and interesting places. The valleys stem from seemingly the same place; repeated mention of the knives in the dark, heavy handed prose and dialog seemingly trying to make every scene a beautiful interaction, and overstaying welcome in interesting places. The bugaboo for me lies in the present and not the past, I was often engrossed in the young Ari and his cast of characters while being bored with Storyteller and his cast. All that is to say The Doors of Midnight is an uneven experience that is building to something that could be grand and will keep me coming back for the rest of this saga.

I really like Virdi's writing but struggle with his books. He goes from his tale as an adult to his tale as a child and then tell the tale of someone else. It becomes taxing to read. I love the world and the characters, If I had it in a word document I'd pull it apart and do a linerar progession of the story line.
I recommend the book if you are patient.

I wanted to love this one. After reading The First Binding, I wanted something more than a Silk Road Name of the Wind fanfiction, and I did get that. I just wasn't impressed with the story or the prose. I DNF'd this one about 40% in because I never felt invested.