I approached this book with some trepidation. I had some really mixed feelings about the first book.
Now after reading book 2 in the series, I’m wondering… is this a satire? It has the hogwarts houses. It has the tingling spidey sense. It has the hot bad boys. It has the evil and yet somehow vulnerable enemies and the ridiculous and yet somehow badass friends. Am I supposed to hate all these people?
I remain confused.
So EVEN THOUGH I find a lot of the writing and situations terrible, I’m still somehow thoroughly sucked into this series.
For one thing, Fae society is 100% dysfunctional. Their obsession with magical power means they completely discount and overlook any other worthwhile contribution to society. There must be an army of brilliant tacticians using their skills to set up floral displays in wealthy households because they aren’t particularly blessed in the area of shooting fireballs out their butts.
And in a big way this is how Tory and Darcy manage to humiliate the heirs one by one. Their plans aren’t particularly subtle or clever, it just seems like the Fae have this huge blind spot. All of their conflict is so direct and so driven by their emotions that the idea that somebody might plot against them in secret is inconceivable.
This may be an overly complicated way of saying holy shit, these people are so dumb. But I really think they could use a human to slap them upside the head and say holy shit, you people need to learn about workplace safety and HR violations.
And then the authors show you this dysfunctional society and start to unpack how the heirs were raised in it. And not just the readers, but the woman they almost murdered start to feel sympathy towards them because of it.
This is so messed up.
I also have to say, one thing that I find extremely accurate about this writing is the idea that rich privileged boys absolutely do not understand the concept of repercussions for their actions. I have known one or two in my life, and they each had their own life shit to deal with, but in their heads it was 100% divorced from how they interacted with the rest of the world. And the idea that they might fuck up and it might matter to their lives? Did not compute. What I find less believable is the idea that you can watch that play out and still find one of these knobs attractive, no matter what they look like.
I will confess I am sucked into the soap opera and the next book has just arrived at the library, so I’m gong to dive in.