Overall I enjoyed the story, though once again I have to question the use of David Stifel. His delivery is incredibly flat and honestly takes away focus from the story. He sounds like a Ben Stein impersonator.
(Minor spoilers ahead)
I have two complaints, besides Stifel, that are enough to drop the rating by a star. First, I am really getting tired of important scenes or conversations being entirely skipped with a brief summary the next chapter. Like Jason about to go off on his parents for how they have been treating him or when Jason and Alfred decided to tell Riley the truth. These would have been great scenes to show some emotion and depth to Jason but instead it skips ahead to the next day which is infuriating.
My second complaint is the switch to having entire chapters devoted to characters we do not care about. This typically happens after something interesting the story has occurred and it feels like Bagwell had to shift gears to bore his readers with a jarring switch between something interesting to something boring and typically adds little to the story. The whole romance arc with Jason and Riley was just bad. I have met some seriously awkward people in my life, but I have never seen two people be so bad at communicating like adults. I get they are still teens but its like Bagwell has no idea how to write real human interactions.
This is not worth lowering the story by a star, but I am really tired of the Alex plotline. He was a book 1 antagonist that should have ended there. I don’t know why Bagwell insists bringing him back because he is only annoying and not really worth rehashing. I immediately lose interest in reading anytime Alex is in the story. There are so many more interesting things happening that could be the focus but yet we have to deal with subplot about an entitled bully who has had zero character development. Even the thread with his hallucination of his dead mother haunting his every decision kinda falls aside and is written as an afterthought. A lot of this clashes with what Alfred is trying to do and makes zero sense from a story telling perspective.
Overall, the story has its high points with Jason and Riley, and I liked the court drama with Jason and the CPSC. Gloria is a far more interesting antagonist and I can see her motivations far more clearly. I wish they had focused on Frank a little more with claiming the nearby villages. Honestly, I had hoped that it would have been one of the main focuses of the story for Jason, but Bagwell panned it off on Frank.
I will continue reading for now, but I am starting to feel fatigue with some of the issues I have mentioned. Especially Stiefel. The man is killing a lot of the fun.