I like her, I like that she is a good storyteller, but I'm not blind to the fact that she isn't a good writer. The story could've fit in one book if Meyer wasn't a pathological overwriter or had an editor that didn't fear using the editorial hatchet more forcefully. Now that the story is finished, I can tell that this second book was not needed. That's probably why the most unpredictable characters are usually her villains, because the protagonists' course to follow is no mystery. Honestly, nobody grows as a character here! Meyer's characters are so surprisingly stationary and don't deviate from what they are supposed to be. Serilda doesn't grow as a character and doesn't mature, she's still the same talkative liar she was in the beginning, her character remains as shallow as ever. She hardly gives a token protest when such a revelation should've been more emotionally impactful given how deeply it affected her to have grown up motherless.

The revelations near the finish line didn't sit well with me, and it sat even less well that Serilda adapts rather too quickly and naturally. Only for it to again drop to 1 star in the last 25%. It's so repetitive and soporific I lost 3 days trying to wade through it and losing the battle every time, I nearly abandoned the book in this stretch, and would have if, at approximately 42%, Meyer hadn't dropped a plot bomb, the first of several to come until the end, that enlivened the dull story and made it more interesting, turning the third 25% into another 4 star read. Nothing happens there, Marissa Meyer overdoes the descriptiveness even more than usual, and the writing is horrendously basic so basic many 'paragraphs' are one word or three words, no exaggeration.

It's a mud puddle to plough through at extra slow speed. The second 25% is torture, 1-star in every sense. That it didn't happen saved the book and made it possible for me to forgive a lot of what did happen, although not everything.

I'd have absolutely loathed either option, and both would've made this book my first DNF in years. None of which happens! There is no love triangle, thank goodness, and the Alder King stays a bastard till the very end, thank Marissa Meyer. As I mentioned in my old review, certain things in the sample made me worry about two things: the possibility of a love triangle and the possibility of a redemption for the Erlkönig. It's the part at Adelheid Castle after the Erlking forces Serilda to be his queen, this is no spoiler as it's already in the first book.

You could divide the book into four parts, the first 25% is as I described in my old review of the ARC sample (the final published book was purchased by me, so it's not an ARC), and on reread, it still holds up and gets 4 stars.

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