TL;DR: Plodding and slow, but not awful.
Source: NetGalley, so many thanks to the publisher!
Plot: Multiple PoVs take us on a political fueled plot with vampires and werewolves.
Characters: I think they would have been much more lovable if they’d felt less like sources of information dumping.
Setting: Promising but I just didn’t connect and had trouble caring here.
Fantasy: A unique idea of vampires and werewolves and no humans. It has a lot of promise.
Summary:
No humans here. Just immortals: their politics, their feuds—and their long buried secrets.
For centuries, vampires freely roamed the land until the Grays came out of nowhere, wiping out half the population in a night. The survivors fled to the last vampire city of First Light, where the rules are simple. If you’re poor, you drink weak blood. If you’re nobility, you get the good stuff. And you can never, ever leave.
Palace maid Sam has had enough of these rules, and she’s definitely had enough of cleaning the bedpans of the lords who enforce them. When the son of the city’s ruler is murdered and she finds the only clue to his death, she seizes the chance to blackmail her way into a better class and better blood. She falls in with the Leeches, a group of rebel maids who rein in the worst of the Lords. Soon she’s in league with a sorcerer whose deductive skills make up for his lack of magic, a deadly werewolf assassin and a countess who knows a city’s worth of secrets.
There’s just one problem. What began as a murder investigation has uncovered a vast conspiracy by the ruling elite, and now Sam must find the truth before she becomes another victim. If she can avoid getting murdered, she might just live forever.
Thoughts:
I fear this might be one of those books that in 10 years I’ll see on a used bookstore shelf and think ‘Have I read this?’? It started off with a great idea and I was fairly excited for it, but quickly I got lost in the telling of it all. This ended up leaving it dull and deeply boring at times as I was told things (rather than shown) and as the plot simply gave up it’s secrets every time someone needed something.
There is a lot to recommend this for me. I love multiple PoVs and I love first person narratives. I also really enjoy political plots and vampires and werewolves are always of interest. So those are all pluses. I liked the characters on the whole, and some of their interactions were great. Sage and Raven were great to read from, and many of the side characters added flesh to the story.
Ultimately this could be a book I revisit. I wonder if it was the time and place for me. I’ll keep it on my radar for a reread and we’ll see how the author does in the future. I’m on the fence on this one. Hopefully some future work will win this author over for me one day.
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