** spoiler alert ** 
 I come away from this book with a lot of confusing feelings and straddling a very blurred line between love and...not love (hate is way too strong a word. I didn't hate anything about this book. I don't hate anything about this series, except maybe Akiva). This book is the Heathcliff to my Cathy. 
 What makes this review very difficult to write is Laini Taylor herself, in that she's this amazing new breed of author who does all these weird and unusual things like being honest and writing well and not milking a cash cow. There are several interviews floating around in which she freely and openly admits that there was wish fulfillment in the creation of Madrigal and Karou and that when she sat down and wrote each of these books, particularly this one, she had no outline. She didn't even know it would be a war book (link to that interview is here). 
 This has the opposite effect on me that it probably should. I hate wish fulfillment, but you know what I hate more? Denying wish fulfillment. I hate this trend of, "Oh, I was just wondering what it would be like for a girl to fall in love with a vampire/angel/werewolf" and while the answer should be that the human girl would probably die or at least be in extreme danger, it's always, "And they got married and had hybrid children". That's because it's wish fulfillment, and it's obvious wish fulfillment, and it's so obvious that when those authors say, "I don't know where I got the idea" it's just an all-out lie. It's a lie. If you create a character for wish fulfillment, don't treat your audience like they're three years old. Don't lie through your teeth about it. Be like the glorious Laini Taylor, and just admit it. 
 The perfection behind everything Karou does in this book is wish fulfillment and it can be annoying, but it's not to the detriment of the love I have for the author. Just like Daughter of Smoke and Bone, there is such intensity and passion and heart baked into this story. It's darker than DoSaB, much darker, but I like that about it. I like that Taylor is willing to push the envelope on what YA is. This book won't make you sleep easily, and it won't warm your heart. It'll make you cry, like it did me (then again, I'm a crybaby, so don't use this as benchmark). And it's that quality of content that makes it difficult for me to pick fault with the things that did grate on me, like Karou's unrealistic perfection and the mere idea of Akiva ever atoning for the genocide he started. 
 This is where the problems I have with this book come in: genocide. Genocide isn't a topic to be taken lightly, and this book doesn't take it lightly at all. What it does, though, is romanticize it, not to the point of sympathy but to the point of the male hero being able to mend his mistakes by saving about 2% of the lives he destroyed, thus wooing his lover, whose family he murdered. 
 It's dangerous territory to tread. On paper and in fantasy form, it's an easier pill to swallow, but if we translate that to real life, then it makes far less sense that Karou is able to think of herself as still in love with Akiva even after he destroyed literally everything she holds dear. If I think about it in the context of my life, it makes me choke: the idea of still being in love with a man, and forgiving him, after he murdered my family. Take a moment and think of it in that sense, and it does shift some things around. 
 Genocide isn't the only heavy topic that this book deals with a little ham-fistedly. Dealing with rape in fiction is like walking on ice thinner than your thumbnail: you've better tread very, very, very carefully or you will make a huge mistake. This book doesn't plunge right through that ice, but it does wet its feet substantially. 
 Here's the problems: firstly, the graphic nature of the scene. And it was graphic. And the thing is that the detailed attack itself was not the main problem, but the very real possibility of triggering. I am a very, very firm believer in trigger warnings for physical and sexual violence, which of course this book and virtually no other carries. Why not? It's not difficult to place a disclaimer page at the beginning of the book warning readers about disturbing scenes. That's not hard. That doesn't sully anyone's enjoyment of the book. What it does is protect people from reliving their experiences through something that they ought to be enjoying, not recoiling from in terror or rage. 
 Like I said, it wasn't the graphic nature itself that was the problem. It was being utterly blindsided by it. It made me want to put the book down, and I'm sure that's not how anyone was supposed to feel about a scene in which a heroine literally cuts down the man attacking her. Shouldn't that have been in some way empowering? Meh. 
 This is the other problem I had, and it was a little more of an insidious one. There's this area of ice that's even more precarious to walk on, and it's the reactionary period. It's that arc after the survivor has been attacked, and is now reacting to it, in whatever way they do. There are authors like CC who smash straight through the ice and into the depths of the frozen lake, here, having used rape as a plot device and then one page later having the heroine and her male love interest crack a silly joke about fishnets. Bookending a rape with jokes of any kind is sick and twisted and no one is fooled by any backpedaling essays that Clare writes on her Tumblr. The words are there on the page, and they are inappropriate. 
 The saving grace with Karou is that her attempted rape is treated very seriously, though there are problematic undertones. And they are undertones: subtleties that won't bother everyone, but that do misstep. Victimhood, for example, holds a stigma of weakness ("She looked like a victim. Raw. Brutalized" (chapter 75)) in this book, around Karou's almost-rape. Karou thinks, "She might look like a victim, but she wasn't. She had stopped him" (Chapter 75). There are two sides to this coin, one being the empowerment of Karou killing her rapist and exacting the revenge he deserves. Yes, kill all rapists. But this is tarnished by the other side, which says that victimhood is not okay, and that by fighting off her attacker, Karou distances herself from the 'weakness' of being a victim. 
 You see how carefully one has to tread? This is how carefully. So carefully, for every single word surrounding the topic of rape must be considered at length. Rape is such a massive problem that stretches right across our world, our whole world, and this is why it needs to be handled like an unexploded bomb. 
 I don't believe for a moment that there was any ill intent with this book portrayal of rape and as I said, it treated it seriously, which is more than can be said for others. But I do feel like it could have been thought out a little more, particularly the concept of victimhood. Killing one's attacker in self defense is absolutely justified...and adding a "but" to the end of that sentence is where it becomes tricky. It's easy to imply that anyone who doesn't fight off their attacker - either if they do not try, or they try but are unsuccessful - is 'weak'. They aren't. A person being raped has absolutely no obligation to stop the rape because they are not the one responsible for the rape. They do not owe it to themselves to try. They do not owe it to anyone to do anything. When we start creeping into "well, why did they just lie there?" territory, we start inviting fingers of blame that do not point at the rapist. And that is garbage. No matter what the circumstances, those fingers should never stop pointing at the rapist. They are responsible. They are responsible for it all. 
 Like I said, this takes a very distant sort of analysis and I don't doubt that the author simply didn't consider it. Everyone has their own view of their own work, and let me reiterate that I don't believe that there was any ill intent in this whatsoever. But these things are worth considering, and people are noticing these problems for a reason. 
 It's for the aforementioned reasons that I can't rate this book with five stars, despite its beautiful writing, riveting plot, and inspired mythology. Other than a few little thematic issues, it was sound in its pro-peace message, too. But it didn't have the same strange and haunting atmosphere as Daughter of Smoke and Bone, which was why I loved the first book. 
 That said, there's plenty to love, so don't be discouraged. I know that some people hated them, but I loved the little interjections from minor characters that we haven't met before, who were embarking upon their own lives that didn't run closely alongside Karou and Akiva and all our main friends. Sarazal and Sveva, and of course Rath, kept me up all night thinking about them. The Breakblades are inspired, and I have high hopes for the Stelians and the shit they're obviously going to stir. 
 Of course, though, there are few things in this book that top the infamous Ziri. Lucky Ziri. He's tragic, and his role in this book is so strange, but he's impossible not to love. I was reduced to tears several times by this book, and most of those times involved Ziri. I had to get up out of bed and go wash my face when it was revealed that Karou had been forced to bury the last true Kirin body, that precious little thing that would be lost forever. The Kirin caves are beautiful, but all of the hands that built them are lost. If there's anything sadder than that then I don't want to know about it. 
 Ziri's fate is strange, but serves the plot. There isn't much to be said in the way of protesting it: it is what it is, and while I find it extremely disturbing that Ziri is inhabiting the body of Karou's attempted rapist, the whole theme of this series is that souls are what matter, not the bodies who hold them. It's a theme occasionally lost to the worship of beauty - every evil character is hideous, every good one lovely - but it's there and it's obvious. Ziri's lost Kirin body doesn't really matter, because he's still Ziri, and that doesn't change because he no longer looks the way he did when he was born. Same goes for Karou. She no longer looks like chimaera, but she is. She is one of them, and that she realizes this towards the end is a beautiful piece of character development. 
 What else can I say? This series is truly inspired. It's what YA should be: real, raw, intelligent and meaningful. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to read Dreams of Gods and Monsters. 
 BONUS TIME! 
 You can love or hate her books if you want. That's your call. But there's no hating Laini Taylor.