Review: Breath and Starshine: Medicus Corpus Book Two

Breath and Starshine: Medicus Corpus Book Two by Kami King Larsen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

2.5 stars 

I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review 

Breath and Starshine is second in the Medicus Corpus series and while I saw some mentioning you could start the series here, it was better to read book one first. I'm here to say it is better, BETTER to start with book one and not two like I did. This one seems to pick up right after the first ended and I was totally lost and struggled to connect with the characters and world; y'all, I was downright wishing for an info-dump. Told in three alternating povs from characters Aurelia, Roe, and Hale, it probably took until around forty percent before I felt like I could understand some whos, whys, whats, and hows and then try and get into the story. 

Medicus Corpus was my new family. Devil's Meadows my new home. 

This seems to be set in a post-apocalyptic world with the settlement of Devil's Meadows being somewhere around the Hoover Dam (I'm guessing that was the big dam they visited in the story). I feel like it was the current contemporary world when wars started and then a veering into fiction when the author writes that The Grand Divagation happened. The Divagation was when some form of leaders got together and decided to shut-off modern conveniences (electricity, travel, plumbing, wifi (HORRORS), etc.) and cut-off, stop distribution of medicines. After the chaos and numerous deaths this causes, a new group of leaders create the Medicus Corpus, an institution that seems to run how hospitals, medicine, and healthcare are run and provided. This story is pretty focused on the hospital and healthcare aspect of this world and we don't get much outside of it as our three pov characters all work in the hospital. Maybe more of background world setting was giving in the first but after I got to the halfway point I thought I had enough to have a good enough understanding of the setting I was in. 

This had a YA feel to it, unless I missed it, our main characters ages were never given. Book one obviously had them going through an adventure that started with Aurelia and Roe, paired to work together by the Medicus Corpus and became bestfriends, and then brought in Roe's brother Hale, who has a very barely there romance with Aurelia in this one, and other side characters like Holdan, who has a mysterious magical(?) healing gift like Aurelia that he has been helping her learn to control but must be kept secret because the Medicus Corpus would jail(?) them for it, and a married couple who seem to be protectors/guards for the hospital workers, Geneva and Asher. Their friend and relationship dynamics are already set in this one and I missed some of that development. 

I would call this mostly a slice of life story as it seems done with the first book's adventure, they start on a new one with mysterious deaths of young women are happening in their settlement and a new character, Campbell, comes into the picture alluding that he is from a not well known other settlement and is on the trail of an almost, energy vampire illness struck person, an illness that befalls men at random from where he comes from. There's a lot of following our characters to the hospital and back, with Aurelia getting attacked and then having to be protected, and an ending bait set-up that ended that storyline pretty abruptly. 

That was the first night I slept on the ground outside Aurelia's door. 

I did have problems at times trying to distinguish the different voices of our povs and for Hale supposed to be a big part of Aurelia's life, he was very absent. The end did give a scene where, I guess, they decide they're dating and have a couple kisses that leads to a firmly shut-door scene. The magic aspect of Aurelia's “wonder-working” is the obvious thread that will keep going (the ending definitely alludes to at least a book three) and while I can see the path of keeping it going through the serious, I would have liked more of it worked into the world-building, again, could have been developed more in the first. This did read quick but not having read the first in the series had me lost for most of the first half and the second half fell a little short in the plot momentum, somewhat stagnated and time jumping abrupt at that same time and fell a lot short in the romance aspect. 

This did read quick and if looking for a post apocalyptic slice of life this is the adventure they have to get through in this book, some medical jargon, and with a YA tone, this maybe is one of the few out there to fit that particular bill.

View all my reviews