I am extremely frustrated after slogging my way through this book for the last month. It is trying to be too many things and ends up coming off like a repetitive, poorly written, detailed summary of all the events of the blood and ash and flesh and fire books. The way it is divided up into characters without any combinations for events that overlap mean you end up reading sections over and over again under each character. For example the section on Sera was over 80 pages. And then in the 50 pages on Nyktos there are sentences that appear exactly as they were in Sera’s section. Utterly infuriating. I also really hated the Miss Willa angle. I like a nonfiction book and have enjoyed many a history textbook over the years so if this book had stuck solely to reviewing and clarifying the events and characters of the two series accompanied by the beautiful illustrations (seriously, best part by far is the art in the book) I would have enjoyed it much more. Trying to make it as written by Miss Willa means we get commentary that often gave me the ick, sections supposedly of her diary written in the most unreadable and horrendous font that in no way needed to be in the book and there are chunks missing because Miss Willa points out she doesn’t know everything. My eye rolling is eternal.
I really love both the Blood and Ash and the Flesh and Fire series. They’re fun romantasy and Jennifer L. Armentrout has created a very engaging world full of colourful well rounded characters. However this book presented as it is was just annoying. I finished the whole thing but my recommendation is that if you need a refresher on previous books before going onto the new ones just look up detailed book summaries online: they’ll be more fun to read than this.