Ella
This one took me a while to get into. The second half is really enjoyable, but I struggled with the first half. Too much focus on the pack and not about Kate. I enjoy the ensemble of different creatures and the interplay between their kinds in this world, and I found the heavy focus on the pack in this kinda boring. And I absolutely hated the relationship drama, except for the actual introduction of Hugh, who was a great character.
I really loved Hugh's character in the main series even though he was evil, so I was looking forward to reading him as the protagonist here, but this one fell a bit flat for me. The relationship between him and Elara was a typical fantasy novel enemies to lovers situation and didn't have anything extra special to it. I also felt like Hugh lost a bit of his prior characterisation and just fell into a standard antagonistic lover role. Too heavy on the antagonism too between them, not enough actual buildup of their relationship.
Read the first few chapters and had to drop it, there is just something really off-putting about the writing style. The protagonist goes on these long-winded asides in parentheses ever other page that took me out of the book, as it felt they were addressing the reader directly. The writing felt really amateur, will probably check out the original story.
Read this because I wanted to read a book where the FMC wasn't a virgin and inexperienced. However while the FMC in this has had sex before it was just once and then annoyingly a lot of the focus was on how innocent and inexperienced she still is despite that, so it ended up being almost the opposite of what I was after. A lot of the dialogue is quite tired and cringey as well.
I was worried this would be a boring filler book after the crazy events of the last one, but I think this might be my favourite in the series so far! It was a filler book in a way to transition Curran out of the beast lord role, with a lower stakes enemy, but I loved that Kate was back to being regular Kate instead of the consort role that was putting me off a bit the last couple of books. The humour was on point too. My only complaint is really just that I miss Derek, he has been seriously sidelined since his injury in book 3? 4? He was such a good character and I feel like they weren't sure what to do with him after that and he got replaced with other sidekicks like Ascanio or Andrea. I hope they do something interesting with his character before the series ends.
I did like this one a bit more than the previous one. More action focused and less relationship drama. My issue at this point in the series is just that I don't enjoy that it's always Kate and Curran together, I miss the more independent Kate and her having solo stories. I get this one was probably about showing the strength of their relationship after the drama of the last book, but idk I don't hate Curran but I have enjoyed these books primarily for the action and Kate, and the romance was secondary. I don't really like how reliant she is on Curran now and how they did everything together in this one.
so bad. the politics in this are so unbelievably childish. and politics is discussed A LOT. this is how i imagine those people who were wearing Notorious RBG shirts back in 2018 view the democrats. of course the characters and writing are awful too but i wasn't expecting an amazing piece of literature, but the forced wow our president just wants to help people 🫶 that's her only motivation 🫶 and everyone loves that seeing how america is today is just eyeroll inducing
The protagonist was SOOO annoying. She was obviously supposed to be flawed, but the book didn't really introduce any good qualities to balance out her flaws and make her likeable in any way. Not even flawed in a cool evil bitch way either, she was just super lame and grating. I liked the vampire stuff but it takes way too long to get into that, and the focus is really on the friendship of the two main women, and unfortunately they are both annoying and their friendship isn't particularly interesting. I didn't really like the style of writing either.
I think the author had some good ideas but didn't know how to collect them well. Felt a bit unsatisfied at the end, I like theorising and don't need every little thing completely explained but there was just too much unanswered. By then it came off feeling a bit more like a creepypasta than a fully fleshed out story. It was really, really tense and scary though for the majority of the book so points for that.
The ending and the flashback scenes in the latter half were the strongest part for me and I ended up enjoying the book because of that. For a relatively short book, the middle did feel a bit slow and repetitive. The commentary about the beauty industry and our relationship with it was also pretty shallow and a bit too on the nose. The protagonist and her character arc were a bit too similar to all's well for me, if felt like she was retreading old ground here with this one, although the protagonist is more likeable, albeit duller imo. I did enjoy the ending, and the various love interests, and I also enjoy the works of Tom Cruise, so 3.75 ⭐️