by Lyndsey Lewellen
publisher’s synopsis
Brave the Plex. Unleash the stone. Embrace your destiny.
Freshly freed from an earth-dwelling monster, Juniper Conway is stuck with a promise she never intended to make. But if rescuing Plex City from a deadly nano drug is what she vowed, it’s what she’ll do.
Miles of wasteland stretch between Juniper and the domed city. In the Texas Outer Grid, following a tribe of whalers seems to be her best bet at surviving the chaotic storms.
But when the nomadic tribes prove just as dangerous as the Grid itself, Juniper realizes her streak of bad luck is far from over.
Only her shipping crew friends can help her through the waste and into the Plex. When the crier stone guiding her mission only shows her fragmented steps, Juniper will need more than the stone around her neck and a halfhearted promise to make it out alive.
The Crier Stone picks up right after The Chaos Grid, so you might want to refresh yourself on the first book if it’s been a while. I will preface that I only did a very brief refresher before reading The Crier Stone, which may have affected how much I resonated with parts of the book.
Juna has a very authentic feeling character voice. All of the other characters from The Chaos Grid also make appearances, with varying amounts of page time.
While The Chaos Grid explored the wasteland of the dystopian Texas, The Crier Stone ventures into the heart of the futuristic cities. I appreciated the new worldbuilding that Lewellen introduced and the new areas explored.
Since the plot of the duology mirrors that of the biblical story of Jonah, the ultimate outcome of the story is a little predictable if you’re familiar with the Bible. However, Lewellen still inserts plenty of twists along the way.
Cautions: moderate romance; one kiss; mentions of organ trafficking children; brief recollection of an attempted assault in the first book; brief moderate/heavy violence *
*it’s been a little bit since I finished The Crier Stone, so I may have forgotten a caution
(I received an eARC from the author. All thoughts and opinions are my own The Crier Stone releases in July 2025.)
Hailey Huntington 
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