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Audiobook details
She always thought the Guardian was his title to hold
Following the attack that closes Shield of Sparrows, the five kingdoms of Calandra are weeks away from the crux migration and already fracturing. The protagonist is separated from the Guardian she loves, hunted through hostile terrain, and responsible for a young girl she cannot abandon. Getting back to him is not what the realm intends for her. The realm has its own plans, and they go through her.
A powerful priest intercepts her and turns the journey into something she never agreed to: a search for the truth about her own family, and a collision with the fate of a lost warrior whose story runs deeper than anything the current war can explain. What she uncovers from the priest changes what she thought she was fighting for, and makes the choice between crown and freedom feel less theoretical than it ever did in the first book.
Devney Perry moves the series away from the tight emotional register of Shield of Sparrows and into questions of legacy and identity in this second volume. Samantha Brentmoor and Jason Clarke return as narrators from Book 1, joined by Megan Wicks across 17 hours and 30 minutes, closing the trilogy's structural middle on terms that leave no comfortable place to stop.
I finished Shield of Sparrows with concerns about the sequel. The first book ran on the tension between the princess and the Guardian, and I did not see how a follow-up could sustain that without either manufacturing conflict between them or relying on the same dynamic with diminishing returns. Rites of the Starling solves the problem by removing him from her orbit entirely. The relationship does not get complicated. It gets suspended, and the space that opens up is where the book actually lives.
The priest kidnapping sequence is the best thing in the book. He is not a straightforward villain. He has specific information about the protagonist's family, specific reasons for needing her to know it, and his own position inside the conflict is not the one she assumes on first meeting. Perry handles the revelation without making it a single dramatic disclosure. It comes in pieces, each one requiring the protagonist to revise something she thought was settled.
The crux migration is the structural spine of the trilogy, and this volume uses it well. It is always coming, the pressure never releases, and because it has not arrived yet, every decision carries the weight of something irreversible being approached. The book's pacing runs on that tension rather than on action set pieces, which will suit some readers more than others. I found it effective, particularly in the back half.
The addition of Megan Wicks to the narration signals a new POV, and the new perspective earns its place. Rites of the Starling covers ground the first book kept out of frame, and the expanded cast allows the story to reach into parts of the realm that the tight focus on the princess-Guardian dynamic had no reason to show before. At 17 hours and 30 minutes, the length is justified rather than padded.
The ending does not resolve anything. That is expected from a trilogy's second volume and still lands with the particular frustration of a story that has built up considerable momentum and then stops rather than concludes. The third book is not optional at this point. That is, by any measure, what a middle book is supposed to achieve.
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Rites of the Starling (Shield of Sparrows, Book 2) by Devney Perry opens after a devastating attack separates the protagonist from the Guardian, the warrior she loves, just as the crux migration bears down on Calandra's five kingdoms. Hunted through hostile terrain and responsible for a young girl she cannot leave behind, she is intercepted by a powerful priest who forces her toward truths about her own family that change the shape of everything she thought she was fighting for. The lost warrior whose fate intertwines with hers runs a thread through the story that deepens the series well beyond the romance that anchored Book 1.
Take advantage of the free trial, cancellable at any time, to hear Samantha Brentmoor and Jason Clarke return from Shield of Sparrows, joined by Megan Wicks, across 17 hrs and 30 mins. The three-narrator cast expands the reach of the story into corners of Calandra that the first book kept at a distance, and the new voice signals the broader scope this second volume is built around.
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US-based editor & staff writer focused on audiobooks. Honest reviews, curated “best of” lists, and practical guides with an accessibility lens.
