It is impossible to discuss this book without spoilers for it and the first book, How Does It Feel? So I’m putting my review below a cut.
So Callie really was an assassin, the groomed tool of the Seelie Queen, sent to kill the Unseelie king, Mendax. And she succeeded, killing Mendax and, mission to prove her loyalty complete, she’s now leaving her human life behind to become a member of the Seelie royal family.
Somehow in this book O’ Riley manages to both completely assassinate the character she built in the first book, and go further off the rails. There’s more sex, and a lot more information about the past Callie only hints at in the first book. So much more than it’s a tangled mess of gotchas and plot twists.
In this book Callie reveals her true past with Eli and the Seelie Queen, has her past revealed to her when the queen confesses to having killed her family, and also still pulls a fast one on the queen. Did O’ Riley want to write a book, or a series of increasingly twisty twists? That question dominates this book, spackling over the interesting bits of Callie facing and battling her own rage (that Mendax saw in her, of course.)
A lot of the events are contrived, and everyone’s love of Callie is convenient, which, honestly, takes away from the parts of this book I actually connected with. I found it easy to connect with Callie when she was struggling with the rage of grief from the loss of her family. Her rage, while dramatic, reminds me of how I felt when coming to terms with the death of my mother, which also provoked some realizations about my family at the time. These emotions, along with the world building like floricorns, and the relationship between Aurelius and his sister Tarani kept me reading.
Do I recommend it? More than reality tv. But did I like it? Jury’s still out on that. I’m not sure the parts I did like made up for the chaos and insistence on twists.