4.5 — I didn't expect to love this as much as I did. Fairy tale premises don't usually work for me, but this one did such an expert job at commenting on femininity, on princesshood, on womanhood, and on what people do for survival—what they become—under conditions of adversity that I wound up loving it. This kept me engaged and guessing at every turn, and every beat felt earned. It was also quite good how the 40 floors were truncated as Floralinda's skills developed. Progression fantasy in a way.

Muir's prose is dense as hell in the Locked Tomb, but it's light and quick here, as witty in different ways. It was great to see what she was capable of outside of the linguistic constraints of the Locked Tomb setting. She has a reader in me for life. I had great fun with the audiobook, which selected the perfect narrator for this story.