After having enjoyed City of Last Chances, I was very happy to check out this followup as well.  The inclusion of a list of characters at the beginning helped me to get back into the world-building for this series, which is complex.

This is a very different book to its predecessor, yet somehow they work together.  While City of Last Chances focused on a city under repressive occupation, House of Open Wounds focuses on a field hospital where the violently colonizing Palleseen army brings their wounded for experimental... treatments.  While the first book's setting is sprawling, this one's is almost cramped; while the first perhaps focused more on factions, the second is very much a book about a handful of individual characters.

There are a lot of themes here. The characters working in the medical hospital are in many cases using magical forms of healing, though the Pallesseen ostensibly want to eliminate these given their violent hostility to the religious traditions of those they colonize. There is plenty of discussion about what kinds of tactics are justifiable while fighting a war (a war the reader, I think, cannot support). Religion and religious commitment are also a main theme.  Overall, I enjoyed this - the character development is excellent and the multi-POV writing is effective.

These novels are set in the same universe and share one POV character. While reading this book's predecessor first would fill in some character backstory as well as some context, I feel like these could mostly be read as standalones.

Thanks to NetGalley, Bloomsbury, Head of Zeus, & the author for providing me with an ARC to review.

Content warnings: gore, body horror, violence, murder, death, medical content, medical trauma, injury detail, torture, war, grief, xenophobia, religious discrimination, colonialism. While there is some comic relief, this book absolutely does not shy away from depicting war's violence. Gore and violence throughout.