“You still kicking around? If you don’t make tracks and fast, I’m gonna have to run you down and kill you.” (Leila to D, 494)

“This isn’t a job for women. When it gets to the point you enjoy stalking your prey, that’s proof that you’re not a woman anymore.” (D to Leila, 533)

Positives

I found Leila’s devil-may-care attitude refreshing after reading about Doris and Lina, but this enjoyment is short-lived because (like all characters) she falls in love with D. From a craft standpoint, I found the inclusion of Meyerling’s perspective in the narrative interesting because it humanizes the Nobility.

Negatives

This could be a very long list but I’ll try to condense it.

I found the majority of the characters two-dimensional, especially the women. For example, the girl all the Hunters are trying to recover is never even given a name, which narratively suggests she doesn’t matter or only exists as a symbol. The women are either predators (Caroline) or perpetual victims in a flood of sexual violence to which every man they encounter contributes (Leila and the girl). D even decides to blatantly partake in misogyny this time.

The writing itself suffered in this volume. First, the author/translator is usually taken with some degree of purple prose, but the comparisons and descriptions in this volume took that to another level. Second, fight scenes didn’t make sense because it seemed like the author wanted it to read like a surprising blow-by-blow cinematic experience and it instead just described physical impossibilities which took me out of the story. Third, impossibility was acknowledged and then written off so many times that it felt like the author was fighting with the world-building constraints he himself established. It is one thing to have a line like “It was a mystery just how on earth the carriage and the six-horse team drawing it had got into the village [located in a cavern on top of a mountain]” and another to have constant “mysteries”. Good fantasy writing establishes world-building rules and then does cool things within those, or breaks the rules in specific circumstances. I had no baseline for what could or couldn’t happen in this novel, which only served to make the “surprising mysteries” and impossibilities unimpressive.