This book continues the story of the younger generation of the family in the center of this series. One thing I’ve always appreciated about this author is her willingness to go dark – she absolutely doesn’t shy away from themes that other authors wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. But man, this book was harsh!
The main part of this story is everyone dealing with rumblings of other people re-embracing the darkness that this family had fought to hard to vanquish. So now we have Janaelle Saetein, who has been raised to be largely sheltered from this past, who naturally fails victim to it. I didn’t mind that so much – why she fell in with the coven of malice actually made a lot of sense. But she was still raised to be better than that, and the lengths to which she went seemed a bit much. The punishment for that then made sense, but it was almost as if she did these things to make sure she had to be punished. I don’t buy that a daughter of that family could be so incredibly naive. (I mean, I get human nature, and this does make sense to a certain degree, but there were so many things that seemingly should have been handled differently, based on what we would expect of Daemon, Surreal and even Witch. I feel like they all really let Janealle Saetein down.)
I did like the parts of the story dealing with Luvicar’s children. They’re still ultimately wrapped up in the main action, but their parts fit more within their characters.
The next book does continue the story of the daughters of the house, so I’ll be interested to see where Saetein’s story ends up.