The thing this companion does best is argue its own premise. Part of what made the trilogy stick was the suggestion that these two are fated to find each other in any version of the world, and the new material leans on that idea hard enough that it becomes the emotional content rather than the decoration. Listeners who loved the couple report that the scenes where that is on the surface are the ones worth the price of admission, and the illustrations, which are the reason this exists in print as an object rather than as a text, do a great deal of work in a book this short; the audio edition carries the story rather than the artwork, which is worth knowing before choosing a format.

The reservation is the one the series has been accumulating, and it is now a pattern. Across the reviews, the central complaint is pace: that events resolve too conveniently, that the lore deserved more room than it got, that the ending in particular arrives quickly and leaves a number of listeners dissatisfied, with more than one openly wishing the book had been longer so that the pair could simply be together in it. One listener makes a fair comparison with the earlier instalment and says the same thing again, that she keeps wishing for less vagueness and more ending, which is a durable criticism of this author and presumably news to nobody who has read her. A second notes that the story reads easy to the point of feeling too easy. These are not complaints about the writing, which the same listeners praise, but about length and shape: five hours is not very much room to both revisit a couple and answer a question about fate.

So the honest framing is that this is a companion for the already-converted, and it is priced, sized and performed accordingly. If you have not read the trilogy, the experience is roughly a party in a house where you know nobody; if you have, it is the epilogue everyone wanted, delivered short. Content notes: this remains young-adult material, romantic rather than explicit, with the series' usual bargain-with-a-fate machinery and one or two deaths in its backstory. For listeners who want the same appetite, Iron Flame and Brimstone are the fantasy romances already on this shelf.