Review – Death Marked (Death Sworn, Book 2) by Leah Cypess (2.5/5 stars)

Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Size: 400 pages
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Release Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN-13: 978-0062221247
Stand Alone or Series: 2nd book in the Death Sworn duology
Source: Borrowed from Library
Rating: 2.5/5 stars

This is the 2nd book in the Death Marked duology. I was pretty disappointed in this book. It was just fairly boring and this book didn’t add a lot of resolution to the story.

Ileni has been kidnapped and finds her herself in the very heart of the Evil Empire with the sorcerers there. There she is forced to train with the Empire’s sorcerers. She hopes to find a way to escape and hopes to find a way to sabotage the Empire from the inside. However as she gets to know the sorcerers of the Empire better she wonders how much she can really affect this eternal battle between the Empire and the Assassins.

This was an easy read but provided horrible resolution to the story. The plot is all over the place and Ileni is completely indecisive. I felt very disappointed with how much progress the story made and how things wrapped up. This is supposed to be the final book in the duology and I feel like nothing really happened.

I understand Ileni’s confusion; she is thrown from one extreme to the other but she is so wishy-washy. In the end I kind of felt like she threw her hands up in the air and just decided she couldn’t make much of a difference. Not really the type of story I enjoy reading.

The romance between the characters is lacking in the extreme. Our favorite deadly assassin is hardly in the story at all. Despite the supposed undying love between him and Ileni, neither one of them is willing to compromise at all to find a middle ground.

I guess in the end I felt like this whole duology didn’t have much of a point or a story. The characters blunder around stubbornly and in the end everyone is pretty much where they started; there isn’t much growth at all.

Overall this was a very frustrating read for me. I kept waiting for something to happen, for someone to do something…. I would recommend skipping this duology. There are so many better young adult fantasies out there. Check out The Throne of Glass series by Sarah Maas, the Fire and Thorns series by Rae Carson, or Snow Like Ashes by Sara Raasch. All of those book are way way more interesting than this duology was.

This book goes towards the following reading challenges:
– Series Enders Reading Challenge
– You Read How Many Books? Reading Challenge