Fair warning: this review is largely an attempt to make sense of my super mixed feelings about this book. I liked parts of it a lot. I was lowkey confused by some. In some ways, I feel like I didn’t manage my expectations correctly, even though I did try to keep them low knowing that Bardugo is one of the most hit-or-miss authors for me. Maybe I let the marketing fool me and should have looked more at the reviews. Maybe I simply liked the ideas behind the book more than the execution.

This novel lured me in with a super interesting setting that I don’t think is super explored in historical fantasy: Spain at the time of the Anglo-Spanish War, with a close eye on the Jewish experience. Sadly, I don’t feel like the author took full advantage of all the opportunities this setting offered. There were definitely some interesting, engrossing details, but as the story progressed, a lot of them faded into the background, except for the more tropey ones, and resurfaced only occasionally, often in a sort of haphazard way. Like, “oh, by the way, friendly reminder that these are the historical details the story’s rooted in! Now back to your regularly scheduled scenes that could have taken place elsewhere with little to no change.”

This isn’t the only area full of missed opportunities. In terms of themes, this book feels like a jigsaw puzzle that is not quite complete. We’ve got a protagonist whose defining character trait is that she wants *more*, to the point that I’ve ended up with Fever Ray’s If I Had a Heart playing on repeat in my head whenever I think of her. We’ve got so many bad guys motivated by greed and/or thirst for power. We’ve got some (sadly minimal) discussion about empires and how their constant expansions are also very much about wanting more. And it all never *quite* comes together into the exploration of this big issue on both large-scale and individual level that I began to inspect when this “let’s talk about wanting more” button got pressed and pressed and pressed early on. Other stuff just kept on interfering and watering down the messages.

Structurally, things started off on a strong note but got kinda weird long before we even hit the middle. I’m talking mostly about the number of POVs and the way the events were spread between them. On one hand, the decision to tell this story this way definitely provided some absolute gems, like Valentina’s entire arc. She’s genuinely my favorite character in the book; I feel she’s changed and learned the most while hanging on the outskirts of the big unfolding tale. And I just find it so ingenious to take a character whose main role in the plot is to make the inciting incident happen and give her a voice, show how all the events affect her, let her shine. If she wasn’t a POV character, this wouldn’t have been possible. But then there are some POVs that don’t seem necessary, like the playwright. They read like some vignettes or asides the author might have written just to get to know the story better, shoved for some reason into the main body of the novel. 

And there’s also that thing that happens now and then, with the POV in random scenes switching for a bit from third person to omniscient. It’s clearly very deliberate, so I wouldn’t call it head-hopping, it’s more like zooming out to show the world around the spotlight, and in at least one case, it was pretty effective. In many other cases, though, it made things a bit confusing for me and threw me out of the scene. All of this, combined with the themes thing mentioned above, created this feeling of incompleteness, half-bakedness, not-enougness, and I kept wanting to tighten up the narrative. Not so much glaring weaknesses as a sad absence of potential strengths. 

I also didn’t expect the book to be quite so YA-ish. I thought it’d be closer to Ninth House in mood, but really, despite the darkness and the edginess and the torture scenes, big chunks of plot felt kind of juvenile. Like the almost Twilight-esque romance between Luzia and Santángel that came almost out of the blue for me. There I was really enjoying their platonic dynamic as reluctant tutor and apprentice, looking forward for it becoming even more layered and complex—and instead it got flattened to “brooding immortal with a tragic backstory is now done with tortured ennui and down bad for the spunky teenage heroine.” I don’t exactly mind this sort of thing, but it’s not quite what I expect in my adult gothic historical fantasy, you know? And big parts of the Torneo/competition also felt very tropey in a YA way. I kept getting flashbacks to Legendborn, which did the competition thing a lot better (aided by the fact that it was genuinely a YA book that wasn’t trying to be anything else). 

The prose was the one thing I absolutely, unequivocally enjoyed, perhaps even more so than Valentina’s storyline. I kind of regret picking up the audiobook instead of reading with my eyeballs, because I usually get to enjoy the prose more that way. But even on audio, it was a genuine delight and a study in how a clever turn of phrase can make even a bland moment feel special. I also liked some of the twists late in the book, how they were set up based on what initially felt like throwaway details, particularly the ending. I wasn’t the biggest fan of *what* happened, but *how* it all came together was beautifully, beautifully crafted.