tilly_wizard's reviews
209 reviews

This was extremely average and just plain stupid in places, and Kane Ravenwood (lmao) is unbearable as a leading man, in the exact ways that all love interests modeled after Rhysand are unbearable, but I did laugh with delight when it turned out that he was a fairy

and he was also the dragon

so 3 stars for that, Kate Golden, you got me.

 This was kind of a wild ride and not necessarily in a good way, but the author did make a couple of unexpected choices and it's always a novelty to be taken by surprise while reading contemporary genre trash.

I will get my worst indictment out of the way first, which is to say that this book includes multiple of those loathsome conversations which have become ubiquitous in contemporary/urban fantasy/romance, where, upon being introduced to some aspect of the supernatural world, the characters exclaim over how this (fairly bog-standard) fantasy setting isn't at all like the silly fantasy books they've read (or films they've watched, etc). This always comes off as the author protesting too much in defense of their own originality, and it's particularly egregious in the case of this book, which is being explicitly marketed as a combination of two other hugely famous vampire stories that have so far defined early 21st century vampire fiction.

Unfortunately, as a pastiche of The Vampire Diaries (TV version) and Twilight (which is the big selling point proclaimed on the back of the book), it isn't very good.

Most notably, the vampires aren't hundreds of years old, which isn't exactly a hate-crime against vampire fiction as a subgenre, but it does feel a bit like missing the point and consequently I think this will miss the mark for a lot of readers (e.g. me) who are fascinated by vampires/demons/gods/wizards etc etc because of the fact that they've experienced so much of the histories of their worlds in a way that can never be truly comprehended by us mere mortal readers. From a wish-fulfillment angle, this guy (Hunter) has the supernatural handsomeness and thuggish SJM-style slavering "protectiveness" over his "mate" which obviously a lot of people are into, and he speaks Italian which I think is supposed to give him some classic European aristo appeal (lmao), but I wouldn't be able to pester him to tell me about (say, for example) his personal philosophical debates about the nature of damnation with Dante Aligheri in the 13th century, so he wouldn't do anything for me even if I wasn't super gay.

The best aspects of TVD are the complex of relationships between the sprawling cast of characters, all of whom reflect various facets of one another (e.g. the initial conflict between the Salvatore brothers contrasts Elijah's touching but self-destructive loyalty to Klaus; the initial portrayal of Stefan as the friendly, self-loathing vampire and Damon as the hedonistic monster is upended by the reveals of Stefan's past identity as 'the Ripper' and Damon's tragic idealism; Elena's genuine friendship with Bonnie is contrasted with Katherine's dubious alliance with Emily; and so on), and the sense of place and time (both present and past) which is imbued into the town of Mystic Falls, which greatly increases the emotional stakes for both the characters and the audience, in this series of constant battles to save not just the people they love, but also this beloved home. Admittedly, by modern expectations the show did a fucking awful job of approaching the town's Confederate history with anywhere near the appropriate level of sensitivity, but the point is that a great deal of effort was put into developing the setting.

This book doesn't have the benefit of either of those creative choices - the handful of characters are quite shallow and it's a short book so we don't see much of most of them, and even scenes that should be "easy wins" for character-building aren't made use of because everything (other than the sex scenes of course) is so vaguely sketched (e.g. the characters watch movies but we are never even told what the movie is about, let alone how the characters feel about it); the romance leans very heavily on the overpowering attraction of magical vampire mating bond and the physical sexiness of the characters in lieu of emotional depth. Notably, quite a lot of pages are spent on developing the various relationships of the one character who dies at the end; on the one hand, this is a good thing because as a result he does feel like an actual main character who is part of the core cast group and not just a prop (even though he is blatantly death-flagged), but on the other hand, all those pages were spent on relationships which almost inevitably aren't going to matter much in the sequel, except as a memory.

The setting which gives its name to the series is the town (and vampire haven) of Red Thorne, but Raya is a stranger in town, and half the story (including the climactic showdown) takes place out of town anyway, so there's no exploration of the local quirks or history of the place.

The POV rotates amongst Raya and Hunter and an unnamed third character called "The Predator" (strangely, he remains unnamed in the chapter titles even after his identity has been revealed), who is stalking our heroes with some kind of violent intent, leading one to naturally assume that "The Predator" must be Hunter's evil brother Kian,

but in the climactic battle, it turns out "The Predator" is actually a hitherto unknown vampire seeking to avenge his murdered family.

Definitely the most surprising aspect of this story was that

it doesn't appear to be working towards a love triangle, and that Kian is regarded purely as a 'psychopathic' villain, seemingly without any sympathetic hidden depths. There is a suggestion that he has Daddy Issues but it was throwaway enough that I don't expect we're going to get a second book full of psychoanalysis about it.

I am so torn about this because generally I fucking hate love triangles but considering the inspirational source material for this book it feels like such a waste of a character. I consider TVD to be one of the only good love triangle (or square) premises ever ("premise", not necessarily "execution") because the story is just as much about the reconciliation of the brothers as it is about which one Elena will end up with, with the romantic drama between Stefan, Damon, Elena, and Katherine being the catalyst for that.

All that being said, the first Vampire Diaries book wasn't anything particularly special either, and arguably neither was the first Twilight book, so where there's sequels there's hope. 

I never found a reason to care about this series before now, but the new sequel is a vampire story and Mahurin seems to have okay opinions about vampires, so let's go

There's a lot to dislike here - Lou starts out as an unusually hateable protagonist of the 'strong female character' variety (she's violent and crass and Not Like the Other Girls because she wears trousers and swears a lot and disdains the idea of romance); the pacing is insane - this is a trilogy of big-ass books, but the characters go from hating each other, to being in love, back to hate, and back to true love all in this first installment; the prose is ham-fisted (prominently featuring my personal most-hated literary non-technique, where the reader is given enough clues for the answer to a mystery, only for the narration to directly tell the answer immediately afterwards, just in case the reader was too stupid to figure it out for herself); the setting is a fantasy world but inexplicably it's also just late-medieval France, including Catholicism (it's not even fantasy Catholicism!). For a story that is entirely about the church's persecution of witches, the religious history and beliefs of this world are strangely underdeveloped - the book seems to assume that nothing really needs to be explored in-depth because the reader will already be familiar enough with the pop-culture fanfic version of Christianity that is typical in modern YA (as well as my favourite "ancient" "historical" pagan religion, the 20th century Triple Moon Goddess, lmao), but there's just enough tweaking to make me want to know more - they celebrate Christmas, which is still called "Christmas" but it's only a commemoration of a miracle of St Nicholas, and not the birth of Jesus, who doesn't seem to exist, except "Judas" is still the eponym for a traitor, so there must be some kind of gospel-equivalent...

Amazingly, the book has one single redeeming quality that renders all of these flaws insignificant, which is the fact that, for once in this genre, it actually has a decently-executed theme. 

Admittedly this theme could have been foregrounded a lot better than it was, but the bar is so low that I appreciate the fact that it was there at all. Basically, there are two famous stories within the setting which serve as parallels to the main plot about the romance between Lou the witch and Reid the witch-hunter - the founding myth of both the witches and the witch-hunters is a tragedy about a witch who fell in love with a knight, and our enemies-turned-lovers do their bonding over a novel about two characters from enemy kingdoms who fall in love but die saving the world. And it sucks.

This is a big fucking deal because although enemies-to-lovers has been the big trend in fantasy/romance for the past few years (albeit that the definition of 'enemies' has been diluted enough to have become essentially meaningless), none of these popular books that I've read (or read about) have ever really directly engaged with the idea of tragic 'star-crossed lovers' as a literary tradition going back to Pyramus and Thisbe which, in its modern incarnations, has become loaded with all kinds of misogyny and/or racism and/or mental-health-stigma and/or USAmerican military-death-cult weirdness etc etc and which consequently, the book-buying, media-consuming, tiktok-influencing zeitgeist of mostly adult women are currently in revolt against. 

Most of these recently published books which were written in response to the undesirable ending of another specific story (i.e. every Reylo fic over the past 2 years) are contemporary romcoms, which conveniently allows SFF writers/publishers/adapters etc to disregard audience feedback and disappointed expectations about their own work, on the basis that contemporary/romcom fans and SFF fans are separate audiences, rather than a Venn diagram with a very sizeable overlap. 

The handful of Zutara and Dramione/Drarry inspired books (and probably others) that have shown up have tended to be either historical or modern/urban fantasy, but those never get quite as much attention, and are typically marketed as being 'inspired by' rather than shamelessly flaunting the 'fix-it fic' label, so they typically don't have the requisite amount of spiteful energy I need to live. 

This book is in that 'inspired by' category (Nina/Matthias), but it shoves its message in your face and thus feels like it has something to say about the recent state of fantasy/romance as a genre, instead of being just a nice little story in a bubble where the enemies live happily-ever-after for once, and it's fucking great. 

(I see that a bunch of people seem to be mad about the sequels, so if one or both of them dies at the end I swear I will burn the fucking world) 

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.

After having read the first few chapters of this book, I was already rolling my eyes at Schwab's indulgence in the vicious, juvenile attitude typical of recent (mostly American) YA towards Christianity - an early conversation between Kell and King George IV (surely the most fair and authentic representation of Christianity that she could have chosen, out of all the Christians in real-world London circa 1820) positions the Red Londoners (who apparently worship magic and the natural elements, which was not a feature in the first book and is only vaguely sketched in this one) as morally superior the eeeevil and stupid Anglicans of Grey London, who worship an invisible man in the sky due to fear of eternal damnation. The one bit of nuance that is given to this conversation is that Kell is unable to explain the point of living well if there is no spiritual consequence to one’s actions (a question which neither this book nor its sequel actually answers). Naturally, no non-despicable Christian characters are ever introduced to provide a balanced exploration of views.

The one other historical Christian (radical dissident Christian, but still) mentioned in the book (but bizarrely, never in connection with any conversation about religion) is my guy William Blake (again), and where do I even fucking start, lmao

Considering how obscure Blake was in his own lifetime, and how few copies of his works existed (Songs of Innocence and Experience was basically only circulated amongst his personal friends), having Lila (who is a cynical atheist) comfort herself with the memory of her mother reading her Blake's A Cradle Song, a poem wherein a mother compares her own baby to baby Jesus, sure was A Choice.

In fact, after the first few chapters, the book almost totally forgets about ideas of religion for several hundred pages in favour of…fucking training arcs, and a Triwizard tournament.

Nothing happens for 350 pages. At the end of book 1, Lila wanted to become a pirate, so in this one, she joins a pirate crew (none of whom have more than a name and a single unmemorable character trait), makes friends with the captain (who is secretly a nobleman, like every fantasy pirate captain from the past 30+ years); the captain is also a wizard, so he teaches her some magic, then she decides she wants to enter this tournament (which Prince Rhy has also arranged for Kell to enter in disguise, that’s the other plotline); the contestants (none of whom have any more characterisation than the pirates) meet up in a tavern, and Lila steals the identity of one of them…

There are some passable attempts at creating parallelisms between Kell and Lila (in order to lay tracks for the romance subplot), but really, all of this could have been summarised in one long chapter. The tournament itself could have been summarised in one or two chapters, because none of the matches really matter (beyond Schwab's idea of 'kewl fight scenes'), really it's just an elaborate and long-winded plot device to create conflict between Kell and the royals when it's revealed that he enrolled in secret. The four Londons (which are supposed to be the unique selling point of the series) could have been just four cities in the same fantasy world, and it would have made no difference.