This felt like such a love letter to Jewish culture and mythology. I loved this book, but at the same time it has its issues—not enough to take away my enjoyment, but enough for me to say that it isn't an all-time favorite. The pacing is a bit off, the overall plot structure a bit disjointed, but at the same time the writing is beautiful and the characters felt (to me) rich and complex. At the end of the day, writing and characters tend to mean the most to me so it makes sense for the issues I had to take a backseat to the aspects that I love most when those issues aren't necessarily things I put much stock in for the most part.

I definitely preferred the first chunk of this book over the second, if only because we were spending more time with Évike and Gáspár and letting their characters breathe before the second chunk of the book takes over and almost suffocates them with a plot that could have been fleshed out more throughout the course of whole book.

That first half remains a beautiful story to me and I loved it so much, and I know this was Ava Reid's debut so I know the storytelling might not be as tight as regular fantasy readers might wish. I am a regular fantasy reader, but I'm also a simple girl who has a love for dark and haunted fairy tales and Jewish mythology.