Maerad is a girl with a tragic and bitter past, but her powers grow stronger by the day. Now she and her mentor, Cadvan, hunted by both the Light and the Dark, must unravel the Riddle of the Treesong before their fractured kingdom erupts in chaos. The quest leads Maerad over terrifying seas and vast stretches of glacial wilderness, ever closer to the seductive Winterking ally of her most powerful enemy, the Nameless One. Trapped in the Winterking's icy realm, Maerad must confront what she has suspected all along: that she is the greatest riddle of all.
The second book in this quartet picks up exactly where The Naming left off, and once again Alison Croggon continues to create a fantasy world that is both familiar and new at the same time.
The Riddle takes the characters and the world that we have come to know in The Naming and tests them. In The Riddle we find out what Maerad is capable of, what Cadvan is capable of. While The Naming was an outward-looking novel about uncovering the terrors of war and what is going on within this world to cause strife, this book is more introspective as both the characters and the readers find out what they are capable of and who they see themselves as. There is a lot more strife between characters in this book, as this is the "testing" novel of the quartet above any of the other books in this series. One could argue that the entire series is about various strifes, but The Riddle puts it at the forefront.
Once again, we see, with greater detail, just how layered and flawed our heroes are, which is a testament to Croggon's writing skills. It adds so much depth to the conflict. If the characters were one-dimensional and bland, you would not care about the conflict that is happening both between characters and within the world they live in. These characters are well-designed, well-realized, and have outdone themselves compared to their previous outing. Croggon takes the foundations that she laid in The Naming and builds upon them, continuing to create an old-yet-new tale with consistency and growth.
The nice thing about subsequent books in a series is how world-building is not as necessary. This being the second book of four, Croggon has already developed her world in The Riddle, but, much like her character arcs, she continues to have them grow and build off the foundational level as well. We see new lands, new areas, uncharted territories in this book, which adds to the mythos of the world that she has built. The plot flows well, and it was, once again, nearly impossible to put down.
The Riddle is once again an amazing story that is split between being plot driven and character driven in a happy medium. The characters grow and become more layered, while still remaining realistic and flawed. There is a lot of much-needed strife in this particular outing so as to realize what is truly at stake. In this introspective novel, Alison Croggon builds upon the foundation she set in place in The Naming, and does so with poise and skill. The Riddle, like The Naming, gets a 5/5.
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