Wintersong 
 2.5 stars. 
 (I really am being generous here.) 
 Mmmmmmmmmm I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this book. 
 I was so sure I was going to love this. The blurb made it sound so mysterious and creepy and intriguing: a young musician gets caught up with evil goblins who steal her sister, and she has to find a way into a dark underworld to save her. Music. Creepy faeries. Underground lairs. Strong sibling relationships. Twisty, mysterious plots. THIS HAD SO MUCH POTENTIAL. Also, I know this has nothing to do with the bookaEUR(tm)s content, but the cover is GORGEOUS, and I was buddy reading this with a lovely human (which still ended up being a lot of fun even if we lowkey hated this). 
 So you could say I was excited. 
 And the first quarter of this was pretty fucking great. It was exactly what I wanted: a mysterious and eerie mix of fairytale and psychological thriller, with a hint of paranormal romance. The writing was beautiful. I seriously felt like I should have been reading this book on a winter evening while sipping mulled wine and eating pomegranate seeds. 
 (Also: where does one acquire a creepy superstitious grandma who makes ominous predictions about faeries because I want one.) 
 All of the atmospheric writing and hauntingly beautiful details of the world really pulled me in, enough so that I was able to overlook the charactersaEUR(tm) flaws. 
 Or at least, that was how it worked until about the midway point. Somewhere around the beginning of Part 3, everything I was enjoying about this completely fell to pieces. LieslaEUR(tm)s relationships with her family members, all of the mysterious trickery and manipulations that the plot of the first half had going onaEUR|..all of that disappeared. It became abruptly clear that this was not, in fact, a story about a musician outsmarting creepy goblins and making sacrifices for family membersaEUR|aEUR|it was a cringey, bizarre romance with random tangents about music and an overabundance of sex scenes that made me want to bleach my eyes. 
 (This section is going to be a mini-rant, because there was almost nothing I enjoyed about the second half of the book.) 
 First of all, the worldbuilding was completely thrown out. (We learn the barest essentials by the end, but so much is left unexplained and poorly developed.) None of the promises of a rich, fascinating underworld that I got from the first third of the book were fulfilled. There were so many weird inconsistencies. Uggghhhh I donaEUR(tm)t even want to go into it, I felt so let down. 
 Pretty much all of the characters from the first half of the book completely disappeared. LieslaEUR(tm)s mother, father, grandmother, siblings, the other minor charactersaEUR|it felt like their existence was ultimately unnecessary, as the bulk of the main story consisted of Liesl and the Goblin KingaEUR(tm)s creepy, angst-ridden relationship. 
 And letaEUR(tm)s talk about that relationship, shall we? 
 IaEUR(tm)ve mentioned this in a few reviews before, but IaEUR(tm)d like to start out by saying that instalove is not inherently terrible. It can work in some books, and it has worked for me in a number of books IaEUR(tm)ve loved. Unfortunately, this was not one of them.