kaitlynisliterate's Reviews (466)

McFadden has finally found the perfect pacing to ensure that the slow reveal of critical pieces of information by the POV characters (who are essentially lying to themselves in their own thoughts) does not feel too frustrating. The twists do not stop coming. There's at least one one every few chapters including a shocking one in the epilogue that I didn't see coming.

Make sure to read the content warnings!

I don’t mean to be callous but each of these three women experienced the most stereotypical misogynist violence of their time period. Feels like a story you’ve already read many times before. 

The more that I think about this book, the less I like it (which is a pretty bad sign). The author seems like have liked the idea of the characters being journalists but the characters never actually do their job. They literally never investigate anything or do any fact-finding. Instead, they act more like propagandists for one side of the war.

I thought that once Iris and Roman became war correspondents and saw the horrific reality of war, they would start questioning the behavior of both gods. Iris literally never considers how messed up it is to enchant an entire army into fighting for you. She refers to it as a 'calling' or something but the way that it's portrayed with her brother does not make it seem like its out of their own free will.

The way that war itself was fought was also so strange. Why would there be regular trench warfare against magical creatures?

The story starts to fall apart 2/3 of the way through due to the lack of worldbuilding. Characterization was decent initially, but it feels like the author dropped multiple storylines (eg, Roman's family) just to focus on the romance.

Very strong as a fantasy and pretty solid as a mystery.

The entire book basically involves discovering something that makes Vince look guilty and then spending a whole chapter disproving it. Makes it extremely predictable to see where the plot is headed. 

Nicole and Layla’s POVs at the end were the best parts.

The Atticus Pünd book (that makes up half of this book) is so much better than the Susan Ryeland part.