Curses, Keys and Secret Societies by Breanne Randall

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Sisters of Light and Shadow #2

🖉Rating: 3/5

🖉Spice: 1/5

🖉Plot: 4/5

🖉Primary Genre: Romantasy/Fantasy Romance

🖉Blurb: Dark secrets. Deadly choices. A destiny that can’t be outrun. Welcome to Shadowcraft Academy. Eléa Deniz has dreamed of her home in the French countryside for the last four years after nearly dying in the Forgotten Forest. But when she finally returns, she finds the estate has become host to the Shadowcraft Academy, an elite graduate school where a world of mysteries and power plays await. It’s there she discovers a secret about her magic that’s not just a threat to the established order, but a prophecy that could change everything. What’s worse, her father is the school’s enigmatic and ruthless headmaster with an agenda of his own—one that could tear their world apart if she can’t find a way to stop him. As alliances shift and her power is tested, Eléa becomes torn between Alex, her stoic first love whose loyalties are as murky as his past, and the brash, irreverent Logan, who challenges her to see herself in new ways. Faced with her father’s schemes, a secret society, and the weight of her own magic, Eléa must decide: Will she embrace her fate, or fight to reclaim her power and forge her own path? Destiny is calling... and it demands a price.

🖉My Thoughts:

For starters, I'm a Breanne Randall fan. I've read all of her books so far and I've really enjoyed her first two. This one just didn't do it for me. Now, I did read a netgalley eArc version and I ALWAYS buy a paperback copy of my eArcs so I'd like to give the fully revised copy a read before I give my full and final review because I read in the Goodreads review comments that the netgalley epub that was submitted was a very rough draft and many edits were made to the final copy.

Back to business, I read the first book in this series and I absolutely loved it. I was completely sucked into the storyline and the characters, couldn't put it down. This one just didn't really do it for me. It fell kind of flat. Even though we met Elea in book 1, she doesn't give off the same character vibes or read the same. I get that a year or two are supposed to have passed but it feels like a disconnect from the previous book. I also had a hard time connecting with Logan's character. He felt very generic and sort of full of one liners? Idk how else to describe him.

I did really like the new characters introduced as Elea's friends at the Academy and I love love LOVE the setting. Some of the twists that were added in towards the end of the story kept me locked in and interested in a way that the first half of the book failed to do. All of that being said, overall it felt a little bit like a smutty Harry Potter book to me. The characters seemed childlike, which gave it an even weirder vibe for me.

All of that being said, I'm going to order the paperback today and read the final version to see how the changes affect the story.