This book is a great example of what happens when an author lets the plot get too far away from them.

At times, the only thing that kept me wanting to read is my waiting to see when Nesta and other ACOTAR characters would reappear.

Bryce continues to be insufferable and annoying. I wish Ethan and Connor could switch places. Hypaxia definitely got the Bonnie (The Vampire Diaries) treatment throughout the entire book, and while on the subject of her, SJM never really builds upon race as a construct in her world building and the characters are typically sorted by beings, so I don’t understand why Hypaxia and Juniper were mentioned as having “slender brown hands” at random moments in the book. I found this very annoying as she doesn’t do this with other characters, so why do it with them specifically? It became repetitive and made for lazy editing.

And in the same way she did with Aedion and Gavriel, she gives us the strained relationship between Hypaxia and Lydia, brings them around each other at random moments, but never has them interact or address the strained relationship.

I waited patiently for this book (and series) and was left underwhelmed, disappointed, and annoyed which is a shame given how much I enjoy the other two series. Her handling of the characters of color really irked me—specifically Hypaxia.