did you know, radiohead copyright sued lana del rey for her song “get free” allegedly being too similar to “creep. Because this is marketed at YA, most of these scenes end with some bullshit excuse for why they can't bone.

the book has grim behave violently, often contrary to isla's emotional instincts, then retroactively justifies everything he does. oro will be referred to as either wonderbread or an old man or my personal favorite, “walking chastity belt,” or some combination of the three. It is true that the Lightlark series is attempting to occupy the same romantasy feel as ACOTAR, but the similarities do not stop there.I read MANY books, and somehow Alex weaves stories that stay with me, front and center—and make me wish desperately that I had more in front of me. any momentum that builds with her, oro and their new supporting characters is instantly killed by a grim flashback that's supposed to advance the plot (but i refuse to be gaslit!

She's so insecure about all of this, she almost feels like a different character from the first book, but maybe that's because she had little personality to begin with and her appeal relied on how good she was at fighting and also how sexy she is. this is not the happy ending i wanted, but it’s also not the tragedy i would have taken, so it’s just boring instead. Isla actually talks to average citizens in this book, but they're all single minded and one note it feels weird. i don’t particularly like isla and i don’t like either of the “love interests,” oro or grim, but she should not have been with oro.

no matter how much aster tries to get me to invest in grim and his attraction to isla, i'm never moved. The world building felt so meaningless because Aster retconned things that were in Lightlark that didn’t make sense. deadass there was a whole scene where isla wears a small black dress fashioned EXACTLY like the one feyre wears in the court of nightmares to go outside with grim and ends up sitting on his lap.

Alex Aster’s intricate world expands after the riveting culmination of the Centennial games, delving more deeply into Isla’s memories of her past, as her future hurtles toward two possible fates. as someone who has been listening to ok computer on repeat for the last month and had lana del rey as their top spotify artist this year, i feel uniquely qualified to talk about this. it's all stacked so precariously atop itself that it'll collapse if alex aster tries to introduce another plot twist. even historic lore is obfuscated in service of a surprise reveal that the book speedruns through in the final 3%.Like the first book, it felt like rules were bent and added on and multiplied on top of each other to make certain things possible, and ignored to make certain things possible. the copy i read said it was 600 pages long, so that’s the metric i’m going to describe it by (it also felt 600 pages long), even though goodreads says it’s only 300 and something.