In theory, I love the story arc here. I love the idea of a socially subjugated person finding a way to access power that has only been made accessible to the dominant groups, I love the idea of love that manages to transcend these class/social boundaries, and like I wrote in my review of the last book, I love the magic system here which feels unique and interesting compared to other similar fae stories I’ve read before.
From my review of the first book: “Also, a lot of the “high” or “second world” fantasy I’ve read tends to set up bigotry between, like, orcs because they’re ✨️so warlike✨️ versus the other ✨️more civilized✨️ species, so it was kind of fresh for me at least that in this book it seemed to be set up between high fey vs. humans based on their access to certain types of magic, with the “good” and “bad” magic being defined less by the actual results and more by one queen who was so pissed at her boyfriend she made his existence illegal.”
Unfortunately, for me there are two main things preventing me from enjoying the story as much as I should. One is the feeling that things are being sort of artificially drawn out. I recently learned that the author intends this to be an eight book series, and… I gotta say I don’t know how this particular storyline is going to get drawn out for eight books without it being unnecessarily padded by drama and misunderstandings. Maybe they intend to wrap up the existing storyline and start another one?
The second thing is that the copyediting, or lack thereof, is truly egregious. I’m surprised by this because a copyeditor is explicitly credited in the author’s notes, and yet it looks like they didn’t even touch the text? The most common error I see is places where there are two dependent clauses with mismatched subjects in the same sentence. Nearly all of them have this construction: “[Verb]-ing, [character] [verbs].” And in a majority of those cases, the two actions being described are either not possible to do at the same time, or the subject of those verbs is different in each clause, which makes for a confusing time trying to figure out who is responsible for what action.
All in all I think that the author has a strong concept here, but I feel that their editor is letting them down a little by not making them tighten up the storyline and fixing some of the distracting grammar errors.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆ – I did not enjoy this read or struggled to finish and would not read again.