I really enjoyed the first four books of the series, but I have to admit that this one disappointed me. It felt really disjointed, like Armentrout didn’t really have a clear view of where the plot was going and she just kept throwing in extra characters to make things happen.
First of all it took nearly 200 pages before Poppy even woke up. And yes, I get that there were plot points that had to be ironed out, but that was excessive.
Then there was the events in “The Continents” which made zero sense to me. What was even the point of that entire section? If she had to meet the fates there must be a hundred ways to do that that would have made more sense to the plot.
Both the scene with the Fates and the one in Illisium both felt like they existed for the purpose of dumping new info as did most of the meeting with Seraphena. There was a lot of new information and honestly I found a lot of it confusing, about Primals and Courts and Gods and… If you are the kind of person who memorized The Simarillion it would probably be right up your alley. I couldn’t tell you about any of it now and I read every word.
Casteel really started to wear on me as well. In previous books he was protective but he still treated Poppy as capable. In this book in every single scene he was in he spent the entire time glaring at somebody or putting himself between a person and Poppy to the point where it actually started interfering with keeping the story moving. I have to read two pages worth of him being needlessly rude and sulky every single time a new person enters the room and we have way too many new people coming in and it starts to get really annoying. There’s protective and then there’s “I won’t let my partner get necessary health care because nobody else can touch her.” I see way too much of that shit in real life, thank you.
Maybe that was supposed to represent a change in his personality from getting his primal powers? Because if so it was a shitty change, and worse, a boring one. The scene where Casteel was mad because Poppy wouldn’t let him go with her to confront Kolis he accuses her of not trusting him to be able to maintain control. No shit Sherlock, you have proven over and over again that you can’t be trusted to do that. They have what, two separate council meetings they have to end early – meetings they were having so they could plan for a war – so Poppy and Casteel can have an argument? Is that not proof that you can’t regulate your emotions?
I thought about DNF a few times and I stuck with it because I hoped that at some point I would get some more scenes with my favourites. I was so pleased that Poppy got some closure on Ian. I got to know Malik a bit better. I’m disappointed we didn’t get more Millie. Kieran was barely in it. Reaver was there, but barely did anything except eat and be naked. For all the new characters that were introduced the only one we really got spend any time with was Attes, and it wasn’t enough to get to know him.
And then she killed Delano.
And that’s me done. Sad to say it, but I feel like this series has really petered out for me.
Also, I really really want to know what the hell this was all about.
