WARNING!!: This review is for the sequel to The Devouring Gray (which I posted a review for back in January), so if you have not read The Devouring Gray yet and intend to read it, do not read further until you have finished reading it.

The Devouring Gray is not a standout young adult novel, but I still enjoyed it and was invested in the characters. The Deck of Omens is also not a standout novel, but I cannot say that I enjoyed it as much as The Devouring Gray.

In my review of The Devouring Gray, I said that I appreciated that it is not heavy handed on love triangles and unrequited love. Well, it seems that Herman decided to fall back into that YA trope in The Deck of Omens. There is a lot of focus on the romances between the main characters, such as if Harper and Justin will get together (which ends on a surprisingly impressive note that I was not expecting, I must say) or if Violet and Isaac will get together, and less focus on what I liked about The Devouring Gray, which is the history of Four Paths and the founding families.

There is some history that comes into play, which kind of turns the whole the-Beast-is-the-villain plot on its head. I am trying to recall if there was any hint in The Devouring Gray of who the villain really is, and if there was, it was not very memorable, so it kind of felt like it came out of left field. I wish that Herman had spent more time developing this plot development and enriching the back story, especially with respect to Isaac’s family. Slowly, throughout the novel, the reader learns what really happened to Isaac on the night of his ritual, but it would have been nice to have a deeper explanation as to why his family is full of assholes rather than the simplistic reason which involves being greedy for power.

The title The Deck of Omens is indicative that the lynchpin to defeating the Gray is not actually Violet, as she seemed to be in The Devouring Gray, but the character who wields the Deck of Omens, Justin’s sister, Maya. This is an interesting pivot, but it might have worked better if Maya had been more than a secondary character in The Devouring Gray.

Now I am not saying that The Deck of Omens is unreadable or so bad that I would not read another Christine Lynn Herman book again. I liked The Devouring Gray enough that I would read another book written by her, if the plot sounds interesting. The issue is, I have read a lot of YA in my life so far and I have found that sequels do not usually live up to the “hype” of the first novel.