A heartbreaking, gut-punching ode to Earth, anime, and the near-sighted monkey-children who squabble over both. Red Rising and Princess Mononoke made a baby, and not in a nice way, painting a sweet mural in a nursery to welcome their lovechild - no, it was a brutal clash for dominance egged on by our own bets and bloodlust. (Are you not entertained!) Nobody is as they seem, everybody betrays or fails the ones they love, every echelon of society is treated like human waste, and it seems the planet itself is hell-bent on rejecting the necrotic germ which is humanity (assuming humans don't annihilate each other first).

Praise where praise is due: In the first book I was looking for the Jay Kristoff finesse I would come to know and love in Nevernight, and Kinslayer delivers on the artistry. There was far more natural character growth, and poetic prose, in Kinslayer than there was in Stormdancer. I'm thankful I stuck with the series. (Also, YEY for Yoshi and Jurou, this book needed some queer characters!)
THAT SAID... this STILL feels like a Nevernight first draft to me. You can't tell me Daken isn't Mr. Kindly! XD "Blood is blood"? You can't tell me that wasn't the first draft of "When All is Blood, Blood is All". A library of the dead. A female protagonist fueled for revenge by the public execution of her father (a man who cheated on her pregnant mother). The mirroring of Mia's/Yukiko's growing power and growing rage, personified by the multiplying magical animal friends' voices in her head... Come on.

More praise where praise is due: I liked the theme of nothing-is-as-it-seems: sympathetic guildsmen, butcherly gaijin, spies in abundance... It opened up the world, and made the fighting all the more dire. But I was REEEALLY hoping that Zuko-chooses-Azula moment wasn't going to happen :'(. I'm STILL hoping that Snape is a triple agent. I mean, it's kind of cool to set up the whole Nature vs. Machine fight with two characters who understand and love each other and each thinks they're doing their best for the world... but WHAT IS THE POINT of following Jaime Lannister around for so long, watching him grow humbled and wiser, if he's just going to run back to beeping Cersei in the end?!?!
Spoiler spoiler spoiler I still have faith in Kin. Here's hoping. Spoiler spoiler spoiler.
Only downside from all these dire perspectives... is that MULTIPLE viewpoint women were made helpless - trapped, beaten, raped - and Yukiko herself was practically written out of the story for the majority of the book, stuck on an island dealing with her own moral compass instead of being side-by-side with the people who needed her. Initially, the stakes were harrowing but intriguing, I was rooting for our underdogs to rally and rise from the ashes... But in the last hundred pages, when the hopelessness and helplessness was everywhere and everything, it seeped into /me/. Why was I reading this? Who was I cheering for? How could this book series possibly turn around into anything positive or satisfying? Was this story /only/ sensational violence, or was it going to respect the sympathetic characters it had built and gives these women their due?! And in the last 30 pages the answer was..."Kind of?"
Do better, Endsinger. There is a lot riding on you! You need to resolve a civil war, an international war, an apocalypse, and you need to redeem a bunch of traitors and marginalized women... YIKES! O_O I hope I look back on this and love Kinslayer for the stakes it sets up, instead of regretting it for the characters/world it lets down :'(. But it's impossible to review Kinslayer in complete isolation. Time will tell.