Thank you to Netgally for this ARC. All thoughts are my own.

I really wanted to enjoy this more than I did. I am tired of Gaelic inspired fantasy and this came at a bad time. I don’t mind fantasy novels with a lot of world building but I just wished less of it occurred in info dumps. 

Kylene and Lovelace were interesting enough characters but I didn’t like Lovelace’s POV until about 80% of the way through and I think he made the story drag. Kylene’s may have been more interesting due to the fact that she was younger and her journey was so much newer to her than Lovelace’s was to him. I did enjoy the banter between Lovelace and Gunnar and Pif was one of the most enjoyable characters in the book. 

My biggest issues were the pacing, the character arcs and the antagonist. To start, the beginning of the book is so visceral and attention that everything afterwards felt like a drag (again, a lot of it was during Lovelace’s POV. 

I also think the book was dragged down by the very binary good versus evil characters and plot. Because every character had a very strict archetype, it felt like there was little room for character development or deviation from a set, predictable plot.  This good versus evil also heavily applies to the antagonists. Alev and Osbert are very stereotypical villains that don’t have much going for them, either to make me believe that they’re extremely evil (other than were told they are) or to even find some sort of sympathy for them. 

I also think that even if a first book is intent on world building for a series, there still needs to be more happening (for example Black Sun did a good job of this). This fantasy world where magic exists also just had such strict rules regarding gender and sexuality, I just wish we saw fantasy writers stray from.