Erin

I tried to read this before, but both it's reputation and deeply annoying meme-laden opening put me off. I was always curious, though, and thanks to reading it alongside someone who both had read it before and is also much smarter and well-read than I, I was able to power through my initial friction and find a book that surprised me with how enjoyable it was.

Really enjoyed the middle stretch, was less fond of the start and the end. Muir's prose presents as being fairly insufferable initially but mostly calms down come the end of the first act, and we get into delightful bitching and courtly intrigue among a cast of delightfully broadly-drawn assholes. It's a shame, then, that all of this bleeds out of the book so quickly in the fourth act, prompting a series of hurried revelations and twists that just become sort of cacophonous after a while, given no room to breathe outside the excellently teasing measured pace of the middle stretch. The characters became drowned out by the plot, which is not an uncommon friction I have with genre fiction, but it is one I was disappointed by. Still, I enjoyed this quite a bit! If I gave out half-stars this would be an easy 3.5, it really was a solid 4-star until I fell out of love a little with the fourth act. I will definitely read the next one, which is the highest praise I can possibly give as someone who is typically uninterested in series that haven't been finished for years.