The second novel in the Scorched Continent series.
BREAK THE CHAINS is a great follow-up to STEAL THE SKY. The author expands upon the setting, and develops the characters very nicely. There's a prison break, plenty of action, good buddy-moments, and the story was gripping throughout. Definitely recommended.

I wasn't a big fan of the first book in this series, but I already had/have books two and three in my ARC queue and have decided to try to give the series a chance - particularly in light of all the great reviews it is getting, and because I generally really like this publisher.

'Selium' is a gas with some unusual properties that makes airships float and gives some people magical powers. Some people are 'sel-sensitive'. Of course the city that produces most of the selium is a city at risk of being taken over and so Hond Steading plans to beef up its defenses. To do this, he city leaders would like to have Nouli - a top-notch engineer who designed the gates that protect the capital of Valathea. But Nouli is being held prisoner on a remote island prison. And it's all Detan's fault.

Detan is our hero, returning from the previous book. He is the 'lovable rogue' pastiche - a little bit Han Solo (<em>Star Wars</em>), a little bit Mal (<em>Firefly</em>), a little bit Peter Quill (<em>Guardians of the Galaxy</em>) but without the inherent charm of these venerable characters.

Detan doesn't want to approach Nouli himself, so he assembles some friends to make contact, but things don't go according to plan, and now Detan has to try to get them all out of prison. But it's hard to enlist help when you've burned a few bridges.

Captain Pelkai plays a bigger role here and that definitely works in author O'Keefe's favor as she's the most focused and defined character - because she gets the chance to grow slowly for the reader.

It was definitely easier to get in to the story this time around as I already had a moderate understanding of the characters and the world. O'Keefe didn't have to try to bring the reader in to something completely new and explain it while moving the plot forward. But if we're not creating a new world for the reader, what are we doing for 400 pages? Good question.

I still felt that I was being pulled along on a journey that had no focus. There's some plot (Protect the city! Get Nouli out of prison! etc) but this still feels like a character-driven story but without any real focus on the characters.

And I'm still missing the big picture.

I'll grant you that this could very well be my own fault ... that I'm simply not seeing something right in front of me. But I know this is a part of a series (or trilogy) and I am not getting a sense of where this is headed. Is this a story about Detan and what he does? Is this a story about the unusual element of selium and the effects it creates? Is this a business/political sci-fi story with a rogue-ish pirate interrupting things? Is it a little bit of all of these? But the bottom line is that I don't know what this story ... this series ... is about yet.

Looking for a good book? <em>Break the Chains</em> by Megan E. O'Keefe is the second book in the Scorched Continent series and is a step up from the first book, but still wanders and lacks some focus.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

I really wanted to like this book but it was a chore. It started as a chore and than became a job. I read the first book and felt it had a lot of ideas but not one central idea. I hoped that this book would pick one central idea and stick with it to the end. Well it got down to three ideas but the rest of the book was difficult. It takes place one year after the first book but where everyone is going in this book is odd. One character is now gathering a rebellion. One character is now a pirate/liberator. One character went from being a stoic law enforcer to prisoner. And another character didn't change. The book doesn't figure out where it want to go until the last few chapters. That was similar to the first book. But unlike the first book this book ends with my thinking,"why do I feel like he just just got offered heroine". The idea is that he did get offered something as addictive as heroine but hopefully in the next book it can be overcome. That is something we'll all find out in the next book. All that being said I am actually looking forward to the next book. I think this author has a lot of ideas that can work well together. Each book has had some level of improvement. My hope is that this next book brings all her skills together for the next book. This one was just too much chore for me. I don't want to read a book like this if it has to be a chore. I'll skip the chores and have someone else do them for me.

Taking place about a year after the close of the previous installment, this book sees the return of all the characters -- Detan, Tibs, Ripka, Pelkaia, "New Chum", and others -- while introducing plenty of new ones. New locations are also introduced, including the remote island prison upon which most of the plot revolves.

As issue I had with the first book was that the worldbuilding, while pretty good, could have used a little more fleshing out in terms of both the geopolitical landscape and the geological one. This remains the case this time around, mainly, I think, because of the narrow focus on the prison and its internal workings. I do love a good prison/prison-break narrative, though, so the parts taking place at the prison (as opposed to a nearby city -- the characters were split across separate locations and plot threads) were the highlight for me. Another issue that I had with the first book was that it felt more like a TV script than a novel. I'm happy to report that this was far less the case here, though some traces remain, particularly Detan's affected speech and the typical tendency of villains towards triumphant exposition whenever the heroes (or antiheroes, I guess!) get caught.

There was a certain amount of repetition within this story, and at one point the characters even get meta about it ("We're breaking a woman out of jail to help break a woman out of jail!"), but it does read a little tedious at times. The pacing generally has fast and slow points, and I don't always buy certain actions from, well, most of the characters at various times, given what we've been made to understand about them. This speaks to inconsistency in the character-building. But this tends to be minor. As do similar inconsistencies related to details such as Pelkaia's physical condition (e.g., she was supposedly suffering from a kind of cancer, and yet here she's running around in tip-top shape with only brief mention of ongoing illness).

I would give this book an unequivocal 4 stars according to the NetGalley star rating system, whereas I'd have given more like 3.5 stars to Book 1 (which, tellingly, took me like three times as long to read). I would recommend this book for sure and plan to read the next installment when it comes out.