Oops this book finally made me join the legion of Lila haters; it's fairly close to the beginning when she (tw: suicide)

suggests that Kell should kill himself while he's suffering from depression due to having lost his ability to use magic at the end of the last trilogy

. I'm sure people will make all kinds of the usual trite excuses for this (she wasn't loved as a child and had a hard-knock life on the streets etc etc), but nope, I'm not sympathetic because she has been in a solid, loving relationship for seven years at this point and there doesn't appear to have been any genuine, strenuous attempts at self-improvement to overcome this fear of attachment, nor does she ever introspect or feel guilty about it later. The relationship comes off as emotionally abusive more than once and it's too easily dismissed because most of Kell's POV is (justifiably) spent on angsting about having lost his magic, and later on angsting about not wanting to fix his magic because it risks breaking the magical bond that sustains his brother's life. Hopefully in the next book, he'll reflect on how fucking terrible Lila is to him in this book, but somehow I doubt it.

For the rest of the book, I swung back and forth between hating her and liking her; every time she did or thought something endearing, it was pretty quickly followed by something else despicable, and I never really recovered from that initial shock and horror.

Also definitely not helping was my supreme annoyance at how in the original trilogy, the question of how she lost her eye was a mystery left unanswered, and then in this book it isn't even 'revealed', but just casually explained as if it was something we were supposed to have known all along. I genuinely can't tell whether this was deliberate because it's going to be relevant to the plot later, or whether it was just shoddy writing.

Despite all this, I do have some positive things to say, for once! Some of my complaints from the previous books have been addressed (or at least an attempt was made), because Red London actually has some cultural features now, and Schwab finally explains how the royal succession works.

The depth of exploration of the characters in this one is much improved, and the domestic scenes between Rhy, Alucard, the Queen and their daughter are the saving grace of the book (although sometimes the princess seems like an afterthought, rather than constantly at the forefront of her parents' attention like you'd expect); after all the character reintroductions were over and the narration stopped constantly diving into extraordinarily obnoxious sequences of short flashbacks to various points over the past seven years, I genuinely enjoyed the middle third or so of the book more than anything in the series until now, and I also found myself becoming quite fond of the new characters (Tes and Nero, who we barely saw anything of); unfortunately I struggled to finish once the story deteriorated into an onslaught of Schwab's usual 'cinematic' action scenes in the last hundred pages or so, and the ending fell very flat because the drama I was most invested in (whether Kell's magic would be healed) was resolved, but the final chapter was the reveal of a very underwhelming 'twist' that I had guessed a couple of hundred pages earlier. At least I'm not suffering in suspense waiting 1-2 years for the next book...?

For now I am going to guess that the spirit of Holland in this book is a deception; if later in the series it turns out that it is really him, and Schwab finds it in herself to give him a more fulfilling ending this time, my opinion of her will improve considerably.