Anna Bright’s The Boundless, the sequel to The Beholder, is an amazing finish to Selah’s adventure. Selah’s stepmother sends her across the seas to find a husband, and now she is not only worried about finding love, but also helping the resistance to defeat the tsarytysa. Her next stop is the Shvartsval'd, a kingdom inside the Imperiya, to meet Prince Fritz. After betrayal from Bear, falling for Torden, and mixed feelings towards Lang, Selah’s emotions have been strung out, but her main focus is avoiding attention from the evil tsarytysa and then making it home. Tensions are high between Selah and the prince’s sisters, and the plot thickens when she finds out their deep secrets. Becoming more tangled in Fritz’s family affairs causes possibly fatal consequences for Selah, but she throws caution to the wind to save her friends and prove that she is more than everyone believed she could be.
I scrambled to find this book because I had to know what happened to Selah. As I said about the first book, this book has one or two slower parts, but the overall story kept my attention and interest. The character development is an element of the book that Bright executed well, and I appreciate that Selah becomes a young lady who is not only strong in her own identity, but also is a character that loves her friends and finds what true love really is without it being cliché. I would say that the end of the book was unexpected because it brought back in characters that I didn’t think would be included and drives home the theme of hope and sacrifice.
My rating for this book is a 5 out 5 for the same reason as The Beholder. This is one of those books that I wish were a movie because of how good the imagery was in my head from reading and makes me want to watch it. It held my interest for 99% of the story, and broke the stereotypes of the genre, especially since it evolved from finding love to saving the world to saving family.