This is an amazing book! Absolutely wonderful story and world-building, excellent characters, great scenes! There's a lot of humor and angst and it's simply lovely!

I think the writing could have used another round of editing - particularly some of the dialogue - but overall, this is truly an enjoyable read! I've already started book 2! ( )

I really loved this. I'm dinging a star for significant grammatical errors (headless instead of heedless, but also just the amount of poorly handled sentence fragments and questions without question marks. I don't know that the author should be writing with so many hanging sentences if they don't actually know how to end them without a full stop).

Other than that though, this is a great novel, with lovely worldbuilding that didn't feel slapped on like it can in the case of m/m dark fantasy. It's an interestingly thought out world, with compelling characters, who all clearly have their own motivations and aren't just two-dimensional stand-ins, from Yves to Charon to Devon to Oscar to Emile and so on. To say nothing of the main characters, Laurent and Sabre.

I thought the depiction of Sabre as a genuine masochist was an interesting one that we don't often seen handled well in original fiction (you see it better handled in fanfiction, which makes me wonder/hope the author has a fanfic background).

I love the building up of the ensemble of characters, and really enjoyed the hints of supernatural that are threading through the story in a way that doesn't feel unrealistic or over-used. If the author could just get on top of the grammatical issues with a good editor (or even a good beta who just knows how to spot them), especially with dialogue, this could easily have been a five star read. But as it was, too many sentences like: 'I'm. Here I am. Here. What is. That I couldn't.' Was just far far too jarring compared to how it could have flowed with correct grammatical pacing, especially since it seems to happen nearly every second sentence with Sabre. ( )

DNF this one at 16%, not because it's bad--it's quite good so far--but because masochism at this level disturbs me. So if you're like me, this one's a no, but if you're not, go get it! ( )