you know the saying “look in the mirror before you head out the door and take off 1 accessory”? this book desperately needed that. i feel like about 30%-40% of this could have been cut down or cut out. this book was unnecessarily long, and it felt like a lot of things happened for the sake of shock and to cycle in new characters. 

i wish that there was less of the “this is my mate, how am i sooooo lucky” and “i am so lucky to have such amazing friends, and i need to be courageous for them” type of inner monologues that we saw from grace. it was overkill and unbearably cheesy. 

i think the plot line of the quest type missions they had to go on was kind of cool, but they also seemed meaningless like they had never existed before and only existed to serve the necessity of some sort of adventure mission to find an object of significance that could solve some overarching problem. the pattern is feeling repetitive through each of the books. 

i do really like some of the characters, like flint, remy, calder, and macy. they have grown a lot and contribute so much to the plot and conflicts in this book. i used to love grace but she’s annoying the hell out of me now, even hudson is getting too sappy for me. i miss the days of this series being some petty high school dramatics between paranormals; it has very much lurched into “we’re the underdogs and have to save the world despite all odds against us” which is totally bs when when they also consider themselves some of the most powerful paranormals in existence. 

there are also a lot of points where a solution to a problem is glaringly obvious and yet the “super smart” grace can’t see what’s basically hitting her with a billboard. conversely, there are times where grace encounters a problem and then thinks up a solution that is a complete reach and yet it magically works out. 

TLDR; this is the first book of the series i’ve disliked a majority of. it was way too long and way too cheesy, could have cut down 40% of it probably. i powered through it because i think the next 2 books will be a lot better, and because i did enjoy the books leading up to this book. 

If this wasn't as long as it was, it would have been a fine/fun read but the length meant it was such a slog to get through. I liked the new info we got on the gargoyle court in this one, and the family connections revealed were fun

Loved the action and additional world building in this book, we learned a lot of new things about these characters and their backstories and it was still interesting and new four books in.

This answered so many questions and honestly felt like it could’ve been the end of this series until the epilogue. I thought it was really cool that the epilogue held several scenes from Hudson’s POV, and that they essentially waited to have sex until Grace was over 18 (or at least that’s what I thought but maybe it was just very ambiguous fade to black). I am so sad that Calder, Xavier, Luca, Raphael, Liam, and Byron are dead. Such blows that I genuinely wasn’t sure I was gonna recover from. It’s been a hot minute since I read a book where not only characters died and didn’t come back but also that more than one character I cared about died. But Flint and Jaxon finally seem to be mates if not it’s very strained right now. I like that there were scenes talking about Flint prosthetic’s and Eden flirting with a girl, and the Non binary character Dawood. I really enjoyed them. Did not like Chastain at all.