content warnings:

Spoiler

precanon death of parents & siblings, grief & guilt, extreme societal queerphobia, major & minor character deaths, body horror/gore, classism, hazing, mind manipulation, mentions of torture, bloodletting

rep:

Spoiler

biromantic ace MC [Annette], FTM trans major character/love interest [Charles], biracial major character [Madeline], WLW major character [Coline], major & secondary F/F relationships, diverse minor characters including nonbinary and hard-of-hearing

+ CW, rep, comments from the author

This had a lot of potential, with great social themes and an interesting magic system, but unfortunately I was just totally lost for a lot of the book.

On a sentence level the prose is fine, yet I had trouble following the novel's progression. The cause-and-effect reactions, the connection between successive events/paragraphs confused me; sometimes I had little idea what was happening or why. A lot of the figurative language is ironic/sarcastic, which forced me to keep pausing to untangle its meaning. The characters take turns giving grand speeches and delivering grandiloquent lines, which kept distracting me from the narrative flow. It didn't help that there are quite a few errors that could've been caught with more proofreading (including repeated misspellings of major characters' names), which of course I try not to hold against the book but I'm only human.

With regard to worldbuidling, it all got a bit overwhelming at times because Miller leans toward less exposition than more. I appreciate the scarcity of infodumps, but I just didn't know how this kingdom and magic system worked. I really wish this aspect had been clearer, because I think there's some interesting trope subversion going on here with

Spoiler

women's/midnight arts being underestimated but actually viable as fighting magic despite common "knowledge"

.

The major characters were introduced in very quick succession so I had trouble keeping them straight. Emilie's and Annette's voices sound so similar that sometimes I would forget which narrator was which/where/doing what. While I appreciated all the interpersonal relationships on a conceptual level, the romances in particular felt like they jump from slowly-developing to fully-fledged which was jarring.

Part of the problem might be the pacing. The plot also has a lot going on, with multiple storylines and romances sharing space on the page, so there's never a dull moment but there also isn't much space to breathe and settle into the world. I think this standalone might be trying for all the development of a series, which unfortunately didn't quite work.

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CONVERSION: 8.8 / 15 = 3 stars

Prose: 4 / 10
Characters & Relationships: 5 / 10
Emotional Impact: 5 / 10
Development / Flow: 3 / 10
Setting: 7 / 10

Diversity & Social Themes: 5 / 5
Originality / Trope Execution: 3 / 5
Memorability: 4 / 5