Having just crashed into the currently very trendy "romantasy" genre via Fourth Wing/Iron Flame, it seemed appropriate to tackle this book that's been on my TBR pile for a minute, since Maas has been making this portmanteau genre her home for quite some time and with a very intense following. This just seemed very much a "if you liked that, you will like this" sort of thing.

And I gotta say...this was underwhelming. In particular, I found both the romance and the fantasy in this to be fairly meh. For me, the combo of those two is a recipe for good, popcorn fun and I just didn't have fun with this. The roll out of the world-building felt clunky and kind of un-ending. The characters were fairly dull. Chunks of the character's world would just slot in and out, based on what the plot required, in a way that made me feel very distant from the supporting characters (oh, you're starting to like this character...they will be leaving the story now and may never come back, at least not in any substantive way).

Aside from that lack of connection I felt to the material, I just also found some of this content to be really icky in a way that does not at all make me interested in the author's other work. Obviously, when you're making a version of Beauty and the Beast (which this clearly is), you're going to have to reckon with that original tale's massive issues with consent and I think you could say that Maas does that in some ways with main romance (not always well), but when it gets to the latter third of the book that goes completely out the window. I don't know what the hell she was thinking having her protagonist go through repeated instances of being drugged to the point of not consenting or remembering what happened to her while a dude manhandles her in public. It's just so gross and I hated every part of it.