This is a hard one to rate - the gap between what she sets out to do and what shows up on the page is sometimes wide and yet the ambition and the skill with which she writes especially the experience of mental illness is itself an accomplishment.
I think some of my disconnect is that the first book was the first 90% of the beauty and the beast story and this book is the final 10% and the amount of story that needs to get embellished to make that happen doesn’t always feel like the same narrative as the one in Wintersong. And also Josef as a character - I’m not sure if it’s a development issue or something else, but there are ways in which he can’t stand up to the role the narrative is asking of him.
But what she’s trying to do here is so interesting; I think this one just runs into “book 2” issues.