i'll start off with what i enjoyed about this book, which mainly the characters paedyn and kai. i admired paedyn's tenacity for survival, a strong purpose that carries throughout the trilogy, that you have to applaud the ending because she does just that. she survives a society that is so against who she is, and proves that you don't need power to be powerful. because of this, it's hard for her to allow herself to love, to choose love, because it's the antithesis of her survival. i really did enjoy watching her accept her feelings for kai and letting them bloom. as for kai, he nailed the yearning angst from start to finish. it wasn't really a love triangle but the messiness of their relationship truly had me hooked. mainly because nothing else really was, and that's where we pivot to what i didn't like about this book, and the series overall. 

firstly, there never seems to be a true big bad. no overarching evil, except i guess prejudice? but no tangible antagonist, and what annoyed me the most was that when a potential evil character appeared, it would be resolved immediately in the next chapter. this choice means that everything that happens in the book is secondary to the romantic tension, cheapening the plot and making the chapters drag. this book could've been so so much shorter, most of it was repetitive yearning (i love a yearn, but it got tedious). by the end of it i was wishing it would end. i still got cringed out with the writing, particularly the dialogue; it would be paedyn and kai having this witty repartee that were obviously written for tiktok snippets, and then they'd ask something normal like 'how are you feeling about this or the other?', which felt really jarring. also kitt's character was so unbelievably ruined, it felt very left field, like the author didn't know how to write him out of the romance. his final chapter makes no sense either. you know what else doesn't make sense? what happened to mak, particularly with the way he had powers similar to kai, and the role he plays in the novella. also felt like a rushed write out. 

would i recommend this series? probably not, especially with the red queen controversy. i've never read victoria aveyard's series but the similarities are astounding and quite frankly, embarassing. i truly only read this book because i wanted to see what happened at the end.