The salt-black tree

This dark fantasy picks up right where Spring's Arcana (2023) left readers--with Nat Drozdova making her way across the country in search of a god's stolen heart while bloodthirsty shadows seek her newly minted divinity blood for their own. She has no choice but to keep moving; there is no returning to her life as it was before. She was ordered by Baba Yaga to retrieve the heart or watch her mother die. Nat now knows her so-called mother has lied and manipulated Nat for her own gain; a gain that, if given, would result in Nat's own death. Nat is also quickly learning, through experiences with a thrilling cast of old and new gods, that her power is untold in nature, hers alone to discover. Dragged deep into the darkest recesses of the country, Nat desperately struggles with who to believe, who to love, and how to survive the night. Terrifying, rich, and expertly told, this conclusion to the Dead God's Heart duology should not be missed.

This novel begins in the precise moment where Spring's Arcana leaves off, with Nat Drozdova galloping through hell on a demon horse whispering truths that Nat must learn but never wanted to hear, while she's pursued by monsters determined to consume her. Nat is on the run, in a race for her life and so conditioned by her mother's machinations that she often seems incapable of grabbing for the power she needs to save herself and become the person and the divinity that she was always intended to be. This second book in "The Dead God's Heart" duology pulls together all of the painstaking worldbuilding of the slow-building first book and races with it toward an epic conclusion. This mixture of gods and monsters, manipulation and lies, reads like a version of American Gods by Neil Gaiman centered on the Slavic pantheon, but in this book, the reader is fully aware of the con from the beginning, and only the protagonist is flailing in the dark. VERDICT Fans of the first book will find this ending compelling, but it doesn't stand alone.--Marlene Harris