Amy 
young adult, fantasy
In A Reaper at the Gates, the stories of Laia, Elias, and Helene continue where the series last left us. Sadly, it has been too long since the previous installment. I couldn’t remember the back-stories of all the different peoples and tribes and how they interacted. I wish Sabaa Tahir had done a better job of reminding the reader about what happened in the last novel. It's been 22 months and the readers deserved a little help, IMO. There were characters I could not recall well. Situations were blurry in my memory. And, with all the mysticism, even though I am a friend of fantasy, some of it wasn’t explained well enough to allow me to understand or feel immersed in the story. I kept wondering what was going on. All of these flaws negatively affected my experience reading the novel. I had been SO excited about it after loving the first two novels and meeting the lovely author last month. But, I felt like I could never catch up. And now, one of the characters I've loved most is unrecognizable due to his changes and he has been relegated to a stagnant secondary character moving in useless circles. I will still read the last novel in the series when it is released because I have high hopes that Tahir will give me some sort of satisfactory closure. I will write notes to myself this time in hopes that I’ll enjoy the next one better than this one.
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