The content warning at the start of this book is so fucking perfomative lmao. My "international" edition is printed in my country, but all the helpline numbers are still the American ones. I know it would take actual effort for the publisher to change the numbers for different countries, but they should have just deleted them instead of giving us all another reminder that the USA is the only country that matters, in this book which has anti-colonialist themes. 

I didn’t reduce the score for this, because it almost certainly isn’t the author’s fault, but it didn’t exactly put me in a good mood to start reading. 

According to the author's note, the book (presumably the first draft) was written in four weeks, which did not surprise me. 

This book started out promising - a village is attacked by monsters and 

Isolde is unwillingly transformed into a werewolf aufhocker.

 

Unfortunately, it struggles to maintain this momentum, and most of the first half consists of Adrian saying and doing things that offend Isolde, Isolde being miserable about it and making Adrian miserable until he apologises. Meanwhile, the secondary cast navigates assorted romantic mishaps, none of which are very engaging because these characters didn't have enough page time or pathos in the previous book to endear them to the reader. In the second half, SSC keeps adding more layers of gratuitous melodrama

(Ana was raped! Yesenia was raped! Yesenia was pregnant when she died!)

and every time I cared less because it felt like she was trying too hard.

 The universal complaint about this book which I agree with is that there is far too much word count eaten up by sex scenes. The first book felt like it had just the right number, but this book has at least twice as many, and most of them contribute nothing (except to assure us that Isolde is still hot for Adrian despite all these fights they keep having). The writing in these scenes feels mechanical and repetitive, which makes their great love feel very shallow. I'm too gay to understand these books that go on and on about how Men are the root of all evil, and yet still devote the majority of the pagecount to the heroine’s true love/lust for a man.

In the author’s note, SSC also admits to not really "knowing" any of the underdeveloped secondary cast from the first book, and so during the writing of this book she decided that they all had gruesomely tragic backstories (of course) and also

several of them are traitors.

She says “I think the hard part is trying to decide if you are really against anyone because they all have their motives - but that’s the interesting part of being morally grey, and in a lot of ways, I hope you struggle to decide.”

Which, I did not. She expects me to believe that these people have been ride-or-die besties with Adrian for 200 years while Yesenia/Isolde was dead,

but Isolde is the only one who loves him enough to want to save him from being mind controlled by the evil goddess?

Come the fuck on. 

Presumably the theme of the book is supposed to be “transformation”:

-  Adrian is transforming into a really monstrous vampire due to being mind-controlled by Dis;

- Other characters undergo various physical transformations (vampires shapeshifting into animals; amputation; change of hair colour) and/or are revealed as traitors (transformed from allies to enemies);

- The graphic design has a butterfly motif (which is not depicted in the text at all, for some reason)

This is a substantial list, and the presence of any theme at all is something of an improvement, because there was no particular theme in the first book which stood out to me (apart from the general heroine’s journey/spiritual awakening/self-knowledge mumblings which are the bread-and-butter of YA/NA fantasy/romance), but I don’t feel that these ideas were ever used to communicate anything applicable or meaningful beyond the surface level. 

The one aspect of this book which I do think is really emotionally poignant is Isolde’s connection with her mother’s homeland, but there isn’t enough of it. The situation in Nalini has been firmly in the background for these two books, and I hope that’s going to be the main setting for the third one. I also want to hear more about Aroth (Yesenia’s homeland), because this ancient matriarchal utopia of witches which was conquered by men sounds very Robert Graves, and it’s always funny to me how ubiquitous his wildly unhistorical ideas are in modern fantasy books with delusions of making serious points about feminism and colonisation.