Finally! After 4 books, the formula hath been broken 🙌


Wow what a book! This was jam packed!
We had a LOT of character growth and a lot of twists. This book did what a lot of stories don't often do, which is the bad guys lose but they weren't just gone, they kept coming back and trying to win. So many books and media have the build up to the bad guys and then they lose and just scurry away, whereas here, they kept coming back, with backup plans and adaptations.

A romance has formed between

Valkyrie

and

Fletcher

, and honestly it feels very forced and out of left field. While they've been friendly, and there has been a lot of banter and playful bullying from

Valkyrie

towards him, it still just doesn't feel right. (And I'd like for once in my life to read a sci-fi or fantasy book series where romance was forced into it for another unnecessary subplot. But that's a preference problem, so it doesn't have any bearing on my rating.)

The plot itself was good, it was smaller, which I think was a good thing, I always think it's stupid for books to start off with gigantic world ending threats as you're expected to amp things up in sequels. The book was basically split into three acts, starting with

trying to get Sculduggery back.

The middle of the book was about figuring out who the enemy were and where they were attacking.
The third act was about figuring out the bad guys weren't done and they had backup plans, and also a tease of future antagonists.

Sculduggery got some more character development in terms of him appearing mad and quite affected by the months he spent in the Faceless ones dimension place.
Valkyrie is growing and becoming more of a threat in combat and investigations, thanks to her training with necromancy and her mentoring with Skulduggery in terms of investigations.

I'm really loving the characters of this series, but a problem I can see forming with each book is the overloading of characters. I can see it, Landy is going to keep reintroducing more and more characters and some will either die or just disappear and come back and we'll struggle to remember them.

The foreshadowing of Valkyrie's future is really fucking good, I'm absolutely loving it and Landy is playing the long game!

Also, I cannot overstate my love for Landy using a wax statue of Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy as a secretary for the sanctuary, jesus it's so funny, and I know people related to Phil and we're friends with him when he was alive and I think they'd be quite touched of how he was portrayed in this book.

Also, again, I have to point out, THIS IS A CHILDREN'S / YA BOOK??? The amount of deaths, and gruesome ones might I add, is giving me so much whiplash and I fucking love it! Landy doesn't treat his readers like idiots and it's really appreciated. Swear I seen more death in these books that most books I've read, and I've read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy books tailored to full grown adults 😂