I thought, after the second book, that we were finally going to get a few crumbs of character development, but no. Alina stayed boring, Mal just got edgier, The Darkling continued to give me old nonce vibes, and a bunch of new characters were added and then not given even a little bit of attention. Honestly, Genya and Nikolai carried this book, and they weren’t even around for half of it.