“Just let me go…”

Book Twos are always difficult to review, and Dawson has made her books especially difficult to discuss due to their super twisty nature.

So I’ll do my best…

The other difficult aspect to contend with, when writing a trilogy, is the Book Two curse – how to create a story that stands on its own two feet within a trilogy without simply becoming a stepping stone or set up for the final book.

It’s safe to say, Dawson has pulled it off in the most spectacular fashion. The events at the end of HMRC created an entirely new situation for our heroines to have to deal with in The Shadow Cabinet; HMRC‘s plot had plenty of closure in one regard, whilst then creating a whole new set of problems… and personally I love when a trilogy is capable of achieving this. Each book has its own contained story, which fits into a wider arc. You can’t read these books separately, and yet they do each have a recognisable reconciliation and conclusion.

Dawson keeps her Book Two fresh through the introduction of some new key points of view characters, allowing us some truly illuminating perspectives as we see more sides to the wider story. The end of HMRC was such a gut punch, but Dawson has plenty more strikes throughout this story; I found one key perspective particularly heart-breaking as we explore how things are never quite what they seem. To know the truth of something, we must see it from all sides; Dawson’s characters raise plenty of questions around morality, who makes us and how, and how these things in turn shape our choices. How much choice do we have, in the end, and how much of our behaviour was going to be inevitable.

The politics keep coming too, as Dawson turns her razor sharp perception to misogyny, toxic masculinity, and the rise of the Alpha male cult. Fear of the unknown was a key driving theme of HMRC, and it’s very much the case once more as we explore the male centric fear of the powerful woman. I began my review with the quote ‘Just let me go’ as this was a refrain throughout the story which I found so haunting every time it appeared, uttered by different people trapped in a situation controlled by fear and hate.

The eponymous Shadow Cabinet itself is liaison point between the HMRC coven and the British government; so this time round we get more of a taste of the bureaucracy involved and the wider implications and problems facing the coven from a Prime Minister very much under the thumb of more problematic advisors – yet another mirror Dawson holds up to our world. What I also loved was that we get a glimpse into the magical underworld of Europe too, with visits to Italy and Türkiye, and a sense of what increasing pressures from the male-run warlock cabals mean for the covens in these areas. Although the pace sometimes stuttered a little through these sections, it was wonderful to see Dawson’s scope for her magical world as a whole, to see how foreign politics and issues affected her world as they do ours.

In short, Dawson’s trilogy is growing in strength and revealing that the complexity and twists of the first book which blew me away were a mere taste of what she has in store. The Shadow Cabinet will have you questioning everything you thought you knew about this story. Dawson takes us on a wild, dark ride, utterly changing our perspectives and breaking our hearts all over again. You’ll burn through these pages like an elemental, and even a Level 5 Oracle won’t see what’s coming. Be sure to set aside time or ready yourself for an all night because I guarantee you won’t be able to put this one down.

The Shadow Cabinet is available now, you can order your copy on Bookshop.org