The Shadow Cabinet is the second in Dawson’s Her Majesty’s Royal Coven series, following on from the first book left off in this alternate modern day where there are witches and warlocks secretly living around the world. Book one’s cliffhanger becomes some of the focus of this one, as Ciara is now impersonating her sister Niamh to try and work out why she was helped to come back, as well as keeping Theo, Elle, and HMRC off the scent about the truth of who she is. There’s also the warlock Dabney Hale, escaped and after power, so Leonie sets off after him to try and find her brother. And then there’s the bureaucracy of HMRC and the Shadow Cabinet, where the British government actually know about the existence of witches.
Just like the first book, there’s a lot packed into this one, with chapters from a range of characters’ points of view and lots of threads to follow. The narrative starts slow, with a lot needing to happen and be set up before the big conclusion to the book, and then starts to pick up later on, before a climax that resolves more than I expected for a second book in a series, whilst still leaving plenty of loose threads (and a cliffhanger, like book one) for the next one. It takes a while to understand how the title is going to come into play, and it’s a nice element that it vital to the plot, but also doesn’t appear that much as there’s so much else going on.
The book focuses a lot around misogyny and, like book one found ways of both explicitly and implicitly tackling transphobia, The Shadow Cabinet does similarly with misogyny and with what can be broadly termed the ‘manosphere’, with multiple groups of men who think their beliefs about the place of women and witches to be correct. The uneven power between witches and warlocks is particularly interesting, and though it wasn’t delved into that much, it would definitely be something to address more in book three: magic in the books is very binary and even unfair, and it would be good to see more about that, as it is clear characters have different view about it.
As there’s so many characters and so much going on, you see varying amounts of each of them and their inner lives and motivations. Ciara is central to this book and I really enjoyed her story, as it brought in layers of complex morality and questions of agency that stands out against the black and white morality at points in the first book. I liked the use of demon summoning as something akin to alcohol or drugs in terms of being addictive and a way to escape your reality, and it would be really interesting to see more of the darker side of this series. Unsurprisingly given Dawson’s YA skills, Theo and Holly are some of the best characters, though they don’t get a huge amount of plot in this one, but it seems like that may change for book three.
As someone who isn’t a big fan of fantasy, I appreciate how Dawson weaves together the magical and non-magical worlds in this series, combining interpersonal drama (that always ends up relevant to the main plot, too, in some way or another) with big dramatic magic stuff. The worldbuilding comes up when needed, but I could enjoy this one without remembering every detail from the first book.
The Shadow Cabinet is a solid sequel that really follows on from Her Majesty’s Royal Coven, but also adds in some deeper exploration of the divided world of the books. I enjoyed the darker directions it went, particularly due to having Ciara as a main character, and I hope the aftermath of the events continues to be explored in the next one and the morality is messy and complicated, as it brings a lot of depth to something that could otherwise just be a straight ‘good’ and ‘evil’ story. Also, I hope Leonie and Chinara catch a break at some point!
Fiendfully Reading 
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