If you’ve followed me for long, you know that I love and devour anything and everything by Jennifer L. Armentrout, and yet there are still more in her long list that I haven’t read, even as she continues to put out new books. You will also know that while I seem to be able to keep up with all the new books my favorite authors put out, if I haven’t read their whole backlist, I don’t always get to all of those as soon as I’d like. For both books in this series that is a spinoff to my first JLA book boyfriend, Roth’s series, The Dark Elements, I’ve not been fortunate enough to get physical ARCs, and have read them both as e-galleys, and then just buy the finished hard cover for my shelf after it comes out. Now, it was about this time last year when I was reading the first book in this series, Storm and Fury, during my Sumner summer school experience where I was in charge of the students doing the sustained silent reading, meaning I got to sit and read too.

While I will always be Team Roth over Team Zayne, even with this book, the feelings between Trinity and Zayne are strong, and they must decide whether their feelings are worth going against the rules as they are laid out. But I fell on Trinity’s side a lot of the time, even though when things are actually discussed, it seems maybe Zayne wasn’t being as much of a jerk as he seemed. I enjoyed some connections to characters from The Dark Elements series that were friends of Layla, and also just loved all the parts that Roth was in. The author did a really good job of making me cry at several points in this one, and kept the obstacles coming at just the right times, making it seem as if our heroes may never reach what they need to do in order to win.

There were also great connections, to me anyway, to the tv show Supernatural. As I pointed out in my review to the first book a slight difference in a movie reference, there was one in this as well. When Trinity says no kissing, like in the movie Pretty Woman, I think it was actually no kissing on the mouth from the movie, not all kissing was bad.

But I have to say that ending! I knew there was another book coming, so it would have an ending that had to have loose ends, but this time, wow, even what I thought were the loose ends were frayed and really caused me to gasp in surprise at the very end. Now, I have to wait a whole year? Can I make it? I don’t know!

I also want to make a note about the condition that Trinity has, Retinitis Pigmentosa, the same condition that the author, Jennifer L. Armentrout has. Learning about it is definitely something that means a lot that she is sharing her own experiences and creating a character with the same diagnosis.

Review first published on Lisa Loves Literature.