Book Two: The Last Reformation
The Holy Roman Empire is alight with a new Reformation. Nell Blythe is on the run from the Church. Again.
She is out of Dresden, but far from safe. The refuge given to her by the eccentric Elector of Saxony bears an unknown price, her dark gifts are growing harder to control by the day, and a powerful adversary has bound her to an ancient rite that ends only when one of them is dead.
Her only hope is the mysterious Order of the Shard’s sixth ritual. The most dangerous. The last. To reach it, she must rely on a man she barely knows and does not trust: her own father. To survive it, she must kill the only person truly like her.
Unless she finds another way.
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Select Bundle to buy Archive of the Sixth and the new edition of The Tilted Pentagram, the first book in this series, for R500.
Nell's story is all about balance, how to master the roaring, self-destructive violence of the flames within her without smothering the lightness in her soul when she opens herself up to the fire. It's quite fitting then that ARCHIVE OF THE SIXTH is, in my opinion, a perfectly balanced sequel. Picking up exactly where THE TILTED PENTAGRAM left off, it answers A LOT of the questions I had lingering at the end of the first book.
At the same time, it expands the scope of the series beyond Nell's inner turmoil and the work of one upstart preacher in Dresden; ARCHIVE OF THE SIXTH zooms out to consider the entirety of the Catholic Church's control and how it rubs uneasily against the secular ruling families of Europe. I appreciated how nuanced the alternate history MacDevette has constructed is. The Elector is one of my new favourite characters. Seeing the Machiavellian maneuvering required for even the most influential people to carve out resistance to the Church underscores how high the stakes are in what Jacob is fomenting.
Similarly, where book one saw Nell desperately seeking a connection with the mother she never had a chance to know, in ARCHIVE OF THE SIXTH she looks further for more clues to the Order of the Shard. Friends and family remain close - emotionally, if not always in physical distance - but there are challenges Nell still feels the need to tackle alone. Throughout this series, MacDevette's handling of mental health has been raw and honest. The hopelessness that threatens to consume Nell was too real. I cried. Declan's circumstances also continued to weigh on me. I started THE TILTED PENTAGRAM as Team Don't Trust Declan but ended ARCHIVE OF THE SIXTH feeling way too many emotions for him and his part in the story.
Fantastic, fantastic read. Definitely read THE TILTED PENTAGRAM first. This isn't a series where you can jump in blind to book two.