This was awesome! I can't wait for the next installment in the series. So much more intensity and everything hanging in the balance! I was thrown for loops and stressed and all over with everything in this book and oh my, the secrets, betrayal and that one earth shattering revelation Aahhh! So Good... and now to wait to find out what happens next in October 🎉! ( )

Some spoilers within, though nothing that would give away the "plot".

This one was a little more eye roll inducing than the first one. Henrietta expresses little to no character development and is very much a product of the era the book is set (late 1800s London) even though it's a fully fictional world full of magic and faeries and giant otherworld monsters. Some of her decisions and inner thoughts/turmoil were overly dramatic and I found Maria and other characters much more realistic and interesting. I enjoy Cluess' writing overall and it was a book I looked forward to reading based on the first of the series, but the writer could have done a little more work on her main character to make them progress instead of stagnate. I was actually hoping they would die at the end I was so fed up with them. There is also virtually no ending to the story, fully written to accommodate a third book, which is one of my biggest pet peeves. They don't even enter Blackwood's mansion at Sorrow-Fell which would then lead to them meeting R'hlem and possible destroying him, with Magnus riding off for no other reason than to be killed. But we don't know because they're just sitting on the front lawn staring at the house when the book ends. If you can't finish the arc in a single book, don't bother with it. ( )

I can't believe I wasted most of the last day reading this dreck. And after such a promising first volume, too. But the parts that were so fascinating in that book didn't really receive further development in this one. Instead, all the flaws of that first book—rampant character stereotypes, plot shaping character choices instead of the reverse, convenience trumping logic (so much convenience! so little logic!), and the protagonist choosing to take action when she should think and wallow in emotion when she needs to take action—were magnified and elaborated upon to an extravagant degree.

In her acknowledgments, Cluess says that the second book is "a marriage" to the first book's "courtship." I suppose she assumes we're all just like her heroine and eager to move straight from the delicious, tantalizing courtship to the controlling, abusive marriage. I'm sorry. I'm not Henrietta Howel. I don't find a controlling, abusive marriage sexy. I expect better for myself. ( )

I think, in different circumstances, I would have really loved this book. But, as it is, I both listened this on as an audiobook, which caused me to zone out the story a few times, and I am also reading two other books, both of which I like more. So I feel as through I'm being a bit unfair to this book, which I liked, just not that much. I love the world - a reimagined 19th-century England with magic and the adventurous heroine - but I just couldn't quite get into this book. ( )

Good but dark ( )