•honestly if i’d realized this book was about Dami from The Wicked Bargain, i likely would not have picked this up. but it’s been a year and a half since reading TWB and i forgor and thought this was different until reading a review
•nothing against Dami or the people who love them, it’s just that constantly sassy/quippy characters annoy me immensely 
•i did like the magic system or Diablos, Demonios, etc. that was interesting enough
•this is definitely historical fantasy (i’d guess 1820s at the latest, but being a random 18 year old and not someone who studies history i could be so wrong on that), but it felt like that and the setting just wasn’t used right. ive read gabe cole novoa before, ik they can write great historical settings
•but so often it felt like things were incongruent with the time period and setting, especially with Dami (obviously im not saying “nb people didn’t exist in the past”, it’s just that Dami felt like a very modern character popped into the 1820s or whenever this is set).
•Marisol (my beloved), had a moment of this too when she mentions gender and i was just thinking “this reads as such a modern interpretation of transness”. which is not bad in itself!!! but if this book was going to lean into the modern contexts of being trans i think it should probably not have tried to do a historical setting
•speaking of marisol, i also feel she could have been used better. as much as i love her she did just get randomly tacked on in the middle of the book as another pov character and kinda just exists to solve Silas and Dami’s problems :/
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also im sorry but the main characters were way too clueless about eve for so long