This book’s premise is loosely based on Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” It’s no surprise then that Seraphina’s POV, where she is trapped inside the castle similar to Poe’s short story, was also the most enjoyable. The pacing of the story was rather slow in the beginning especially since the two main characters don’t meet until the 40% mark and even then, they spend a lot of time doing nothing prior to the villain’s arrival.

There is sort of an attempt at adding political intrigue, considering that Seraphina is pretending to be Princess Imogen and most of the story takes place within the castle, but this subplot seems to be sort of an afterthought. There is never any real resolution and the entire subplot gets dropped as soon as the main plot heats up. 

This leads into the second issue which is how the story builds tension. The political intrigue subplot seems designed to heighten tensions going into the final confrontation but it actually distracts from the main plot by introducing new characters that seem important but never reappear again. This subplot also conveniently negates the main hurdle faced by Seraphina and Nico in protecting the inhabitants of the castle, namely that the King has lost touch with reality and is prone to extreme bursts of anger. Essentially, the story includes interpersonal “drama” for a momentarily tense scene to the detriment of the actual stakes.

I totally understand why they didn’t mention vampires in the blurb since it is written as a plot twist reveal in the middle of the book. However, I think a lot of readers are going to be surprised and then turned off by the introduction of paranormal/supernatural elements in an otherwise realistic world. The vampire element is foreshadowed pretty heavily in Nico’s POV for the first part of the book so I personally wasn’t caught by surprise.

One of the issues that arise when including vampires in a story is delineating which vampiric traits apply in your world. In this book, vampires have no aversion to sunlight (or garlic!) which was pretty disappointing since that is perhaps their most well-known trait and a significant weakness to counterbalance their supernatural abilities. What is kept is the requirement that vampires can only enter when invited into a house that opens up a huge can of worms in terms of plot holes. This is certainly true in this case.

Thank you to NetGalley and Inkyard Press for providing me with a digital copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.