Book: with an orange or red cover or with nuts, chocolate or coins on the cover, set in The Netherlands or Germany, by a Dutch or German author, or with canals or beer on the cover.

I'm using For a Muse of Fire to claim this door because of its orange and red cover.

This was an excellent follow-up to The Girl from Everywhere. Better pacing, better romance, more action, higher stakes, better proofreading (pedants rejoice!), and a somewhat bittersweet ending that simultaneously gave me some closure and made me wish this was a trilogy instead of a duology. I really enjoyed it and I’ll miss Nix and Kashmir. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for Heilig’s next series.

I am really enjoying this book and the series as a whole, but OMG. How many nautical metaphors do you really need to cram into one paragraph?

. . . [tears] flooded in, too fast to bail.

. . . I shuddered like the ship in a storm.

. . . sobs struggled up through my chest like bubbles from a rift in the floor of the sea.

. . . I clung to her as though she were a raft.

. . . fragmented thoughts popped up like flotsam from a wreck.

And as a bonus, because in reading the three short non-nautical-themed sentences that close out the paragraph you might have forgotten the MC was raised on a sailing vessel, the first sentence of the next paragraph starts thusly:

Finally, the tide of my own tears ebbed

I don't know, people. I think Heilig could've crammed more in there. I mean, there were three whole sentences in the paragraph with no nautical metaphors. Maybe something about barnacles or lampreys or ocean currents or sea turtles. What do you think?

This book has a lot going for it: good writing, flawed characters, an interesting and new-to-me twist on time travel (sort of), pirates, myths and legends, history, anarchy, existential crises, etc. If it hadn’t been so slow to get going (and if it hadn’t tried to sell me on a love triangle), it would have been near perfect.

My inner pedant demands I mention the numerous typos in this print version, but the author is such a human ray of sunshine that I almost feel bad for noticing them.