As a whole this book was very good. Laini Taylor has a beautiful writing style and I absolutely adore her prose. It's always such a joy to read, and I can never seem to get enough. Her characters, too, are wonderful. I loved Zuzana and Mik, Hazael and Liraz, Issa and Ziri. They brought a lot of joy into a situation that was, by it's very nature, very heavy with suffering and death. 
 But on that note, I should give a trigger warning that there is an attempted rape at the end of this book, and more than a few mentions of it throughout. I think that the plot would have been much stronger without the final conflicts of both main plotlines being based around the threat of rape, as there were many other options available, and it drained a lot of my enthusiasm for dealing with the final scenes of the novel. But still, the rest of the book was very enjoyable and the epilogue let me look forward to what will happen next, if I little hesitantly.