I have thoughts.

You can also read this review on Goodreads here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6457188067   Note: I read this as an audiobook. Please excuse any misspellings, I did not see the spelling. Much like with A COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES, I picked this up not expecting to enjoy it all that much. To be completely honest, I picked it up *because* I didn't expect to care much if I missed chunks of it. I've been afraid to get into audiobooks because I worry about spacing out and missing a lot of it, and this book sounded like fun without being so serious that I would worry about that. So I picked it up, and plugged in my earbuds, and started listening. I really enjoyed this book. This may be surprising given that I gave it only three stars (3.5, but Goodreads doesn't have half stars). I honestly really struggled with the rating when I got to that point, and eventually I settled on this. I worked out my rating using a reader's journal, so I'm going to break up my review ...

Note: This is going to include spoilers for Blood of a Fae by Briar Boleyn, and for Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. You've been warned. As I'm reading the Blood of a Fae series and currently fairly early in book two, it occurred to me that outside of our love interest, there's very little in the way of shades of moral gray. It's very much a world where the bad guys are sadistic evil bastards and the good guys are their antithesis in every conceivable way. This occurred to me because I know one character I'm already just waiting to see die. I don't have many hopes for her to be redeemed. This author excels at making horrible villains who you're excited to see die, and then excels at the payoff. It's like a slasher movie without the horror. Right on the heels of this thought, I was listening to Fourth Wing on my commute home, and Jack Barlow died horribly. Fourth Wing excels at making villains you hate, but up until this point, most of them hadn't had t...