The story is told from Renata’s perspective and during this book we meet brilliant new characters and reunite with favourites from the first book. But the greatest danger is within Ren – the Gray, her fortress of stolen memories, has begun to crumble, threatening her grip on reality. I wish that had been the love story in this book, self love, for both Ren and Castian, instead of 2 very broken, hurting people propping each other up. Although I didn’t enjoy this book as much as Incendiary, I did feel like Illusionary wrapped the story up nicely.

With the king's forces on their heels at every turn, their quest across Puerto Leones and beyond leaves little room for mistakes. Essentially Castian chooses Ren over his brother (knowing how close they were because she had a pregnancy scare) and doesn’t once question the propriety of that, or Ren flirting and ultimately sleeping with the brother of her love who got messed up after finding out he had a brother and his life was a lie. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.We get character development, friendship, redemption, a beautiful romance that left me aching for more. While these are not detailed construction blueprints, each illusion has been built and performed by many magicians all over the world.

Renata grows so much since the events of Incendiary, both emotionally and in regards to her power, and I loved seeing that progress. If Incendiary was a journey of discovery for Renata Convida, then Illusionary is where she truly finds herself. She’ll have to control her magics–and her mind–to unlock her power and protect the Moria people once and for all.Renata and Castian both bonded over their shared pasts, as their characters can both be viewed as villains or saviours. Chris Stolz is known as one of the top up and coming illusion designers in the industry today with incredible creations like his gorgeous looking sawing illusion "4 Way Split" or his incredibly practical levitation for the small stage "Sound Waves". We just didn’t get enough time with some of the characters to understand their motivations, as well as Ren’s reactions to them. Additionally, since everyone becomes fast friends, it becomes obvious that Ren and Castian have feelings for each other, and Leo and Ley love to remind them of it.

It was a fun and incredibly fast paced ending to the duology with a great cast of characters that I loved. Illusionary gave us more snippets of Renata’s past which provided answers and confirmation to some questions formulated from reading the first book. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters.I’m sorry but it feels underdeveloped, by the end of the book you’ve got Ren and Castian together, but she’s slept with his brother Dez too. I devoured Incendiary when I read it last year and had ridiculously high expectations for Illusionary, some of which it met, and some that it just didn’t. She’ll have to control her magics-and her mind – to unlock her power and protect the Moria people once and for all.