This book is about the story of Calina and Jace. Calina is the result of one of Lilith's experiments, while Jace is the strategist and new king of the rebellion. A lot of the underlying mythology of the world is revealed in this book. The two of them meet and recognize that they are more similar than they would have thought.

Unfortunately, my main problem with the book remained - there was a lot of telling, but not showing, with one scene that was a wonderful exception.

Spoiler

The scene in which Jace dissociated when Calina died. It was described from his POV and it was well done.

. Overall, I feel that this was more a problem with Jace's POV chapters. He liked to repeat in his mind what a powerful vampire male he was, it got tiring and I started skip reading his chapters.

I needed at the end some type of diagram that summarizes the familial connections between the different vampires. Hopefully, something like this would be available in the next book. Unfortunately, the next book comes out in 1 year and I am afraid I will have forgotten much by then.

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My thoughts at 50% - This is good stuff, better than expected. I do not like the lab-subjects trope and here we do not have that, despite the initial setting.
What I didn't like is the "tell, not show" type of thing going on with the attitude to sex of vampires, it got annoying tbh.

If you enjoy supernatural, dystopian-y reads on the darker side, you NEED this completely addictive world.

Foss’s writing only seems to get better and better, if that’s even possible. Calina is such a great female lead, having been basically programmed, yet still free-thinking.

Once again, I couldn’t help but admire Foss’s style … now that I’m 5 books into this series, I found myself reminiscing about the fact that I’ve been submerged in this incredibly dark world … yet there is always light to be found. She has this way of painting things to be incredibly dark … but as you read on—and it could take multiple books to get to this point—you realize it really isn’t all that dark. That was more world-building to show you the climate, etc. but there are admirable, lovable (yummy) heroes & heroines in the process of bringing about the needed change and things really have been looking better from the very beginning … even if you didn’t see it at the time. (Midnight Fae Academy comes to mind here as well. READ IT!!)

Utterly brilliant.

While enjoying this one, it occurred to me that I absolutely need to re-read this entire series. I’m not a re-reader, but I think going back now, I’ll appreciate the experience at least as much as the first time around, if not more. This is one that won’t get old and I expect I’ll notice more little things that I hadn’t the first time.

5 stars for epic world-building and great writing.
5 stars for re-readability.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️


ALL the stars.
I’ll be DYING until I can read on in this incredible world.

Audio:
The audio is really great. Sarah’s accent still trips me up quite a bit, which is another reason I need to re-read. I think I miss things while being distracted trying to figure out what she actually said. Her voice is beautiful and her performance is on-point. She just doesn’t pronounce things 100% perfectly. Little things, but they can change up the message and make me need to mentally catch up.

Kale is perfect, nice voice, great performance, smooth delivery.
Still: a 5-star performance, overall.

I feel like this book is largely more of the same. Its fun, it's dark and I do love the two main characters but it's taken me ages to read it as it didn't hold my attention quite as well as the rest of the series.

It's good fun though.

Love love LOVED this book!! Lilith sure is an evil mastermind and I can’t wait to see just what will happen next. The only downside to such a well written series is the wait between book releases, but when the series is as good as this one, the wait doesn’t even matter

A gothic romance novel, Vampires and Lycans rule and humans are subservient. check your TWs. This is a descriptive read and likely not for everybody. This book was again more of a slow burn, and almost gave you too many details, it could have been two books. Because of all the information the author was trying to give to us it felt jumpy and yet so much went unexplained. I don't like when authors introduce characters and they just kind of fade away as the story progresses. It felt like a forgotten storyline. In the beginning, these characters were super important to the story. You wanted us to believe that these three people were important enough for her to risk everything and go against a royal vampire to save and then she loses all concern for them? From getting out of the lab to being the bargaining tip during the guy's integration, last we know they are being held captive by the good guys, but they have taken their child away from them. He's being nurtured by another wolf, who we love, and then we don't hear about them through most of the story... Suddenly at the end, we hear, the wolf that was taking care of the child is now taking the parents under their protection. But, it just felt like there was so much more of that story to be told... But I loved it!

Lexi C Foss has become one of my go-to authors for when I'm in a reading slump! Her books are just exactly what I need when I feel burned out from other books and I appreciate that so much!

The overarching storyline of this series is also really interesting and I can't wait for the conclusion of series!

I also loved that this one was a little bit different from the other ones because the FMC was a badass and more knowledgeable than the others

YOU CAN'T FINISH THE BOOK LIKE THAT WHAT DO U MEAN IM ALREADY IN TEARS I HATE IT HERE