All the Tides of Fate

All the Tides of Fate is Adalyn Grace's 2021 second and final installment in the All the Stars and Teeth series, continuing Amora Montara's story as the events set in motion across the first book arrive at their reckoning. Following on from where All the Stars and Teeth left Amora - her claim to the throne complicated, her understanding of the Montara legacy permanently altered, and her relationships with the crew that formed around her tested in ways she did not anticipate - All the Tides of Fate turns the series' attention from discovery to consequence. The archipelago has been crossed. The political intrigue beneath the Montara kingdom's surface has been glimpsed. Now Amora must decide what to do with what she knows, and what kind of ruler - what kind of person - she intends to be.

Where All the Stars and Teeth used the momentum of flight and voyage to propel its story forward, All the Tides of Fate works differently. The pace here is shaped by the weight of what Amora is carrying - the cost of her blood magic, the complexity of the alliances she has formed and the enemies she has made, and the question of whether the throne she has been fighting to reclaim represents something worth reclaiming at all. Grace uses the duology's concluding instalment to press hardest on the magic system with consequences that gave the first book so much of its substance. The blood magic that has defined the Montara line is not a gift the series allows its protagonist to wield without reckoning, and All the Tides of Fate brings that reckoning into full view.

The political intrigue that threaded through the first book as background texture moves to the foreground in the sequel. The island kingdoms of the Visión archipelago, their relationships to the Montara crown, and the fractures running through the political order Amora has always taken as given all demand her direct engagement here. Grace handles this expansion of scope with care - the world feels larger in All the Tides of Fate without losing the intimacy that made the first book's relationships so compelling. The tensions between duty and desire, between the crown Amora was born to and the person the voyage made her, give the political material its emotional grounding.

The found family forged across the first book is both a source of strength and a source of stakes in the finale. The crew around Amora is not decorative - Grace has always written these relationships as load-bearing, and in All the Tides of Fate their weight is fully felt. The bonds formed through shared danger and hard-won trust are tested here in proportion to how deeply they have been built, and the emotional payoff for readers who have invested in these characters across both books is considerable. The slow-burn romance between Amora and Bastian finds its resolution in the sequel, Grace resisting the pull toward easy or premature conclusion in favour of an ending that honours the friction and the genuine connection that have defined their dynamic from the beginning.

Amora's development as a morally grey character reaches its fullest expression in All the Tides of Fate. The princess who fled her coronation in the first book has become someone considerably harder to categorise - shaped by everything she has learned about her kingdom, her magic, and herself, and faced with choices that do not resolve neatly into right and wrong. Grace has always been more interested in the cost of power than in its exercise, and the concluding instalment of the All the Stars and Teeth series makes that interest explicit, pressing Amora toward decisions that test whether her growth across two books has been equal to the moment demanding it.

All the Tides of Fate is a satisfying and emotionally honest conclusion to a duology that announced Adalyn Grace as one of YA fantasy's most instinctive storytellers. For readers who arrived at the All the Stars and Teeth series through Adalyn Grace's later work - particularly the Belladonna series - it offers the pleasure of tracing those instincts back to their origins, and of finding them fully formed even here.