"The needs of the many will always be loud. But in the end, it is only the strength of the few that matters." By the end of the first book, Vis was a character I cared about and I wanted to better understand what the impact would be of his successful run of The Labyrinth. The impact to him as a person, to those characters around him that I grew to care about, and to the Hierarchy itself. And while The Strength of the Few does provide those answers, that is only one third of what it provides, because now the story is split across 3 PoV characters. Even though I should have cared about all 3 the same, I just didn't, and that was also true for the worlds they each inhabited. So did Islington's ambitious plan to triple the scope of his story work out, or is this yet another example of an author not telling the story his readers we were hoping for?

It's a bit of both, although I did come around by the end to care about 2 of the 3 story lines. It's hard not to spoil too much, so I will just say that the extra levels of complication might have felt ingenious to Islington, but to me they added a layer of storytelling I wasn't hoping for. It was hard to get invested in the new story lines and the Vis-centric story line remained the most interesting all the way to the end. Interesting, and in some ways, disappointing as well due to some of the character-related developments. So while the first book was definitely better, I am still intrigued enough to want to continue the series. The next book, The Justice of One, is not scheduled to be out until 2027, and by that point I will likely regret that I have to remember what happened in 3 separate worlds instead of just one.

Euan Morton did a great job with the narration across all 3 story lines in the audiobook version.