So I'm not really sure what to think right now. It feels like it ended so abruptly. Like there is still a ton of the plot we are missing? No? 
 I loved certain elements of the book, the plot twists etc. I adored Beast!!! Omg, love him. But I don't know why I'm not feeling this ending. It feels incomplete. I loved Grave Mercy and thought it ended well, this one is leaving me hanging but not cliff hanger style just in terms of insufficient? Idk. Full review to come. 
 UPDATE December 10, 2015 
 Too Much History Not Enough Beast 
 I really struggled with writing up this review for "Dark Triumph". On one hand, I truly loved the characters of this book. However, loving a character does not make up for a weakness in plot and I think that's why it has taken me so long to reconcile the two. 
 At the end of "Dark Triumph", I felt underwhelmed. Like, "Is that it?" Despite this, I have a lot of love for Sybella, she is a wonderfully developed character in this book. She takes the series to a whole different level of dark, which I thought was great. I also couldn't get enough of Beast. He was funny, smart, and I'll be damned if he wasn't the most sexiest character I've ever read before. 
 My Fan Art 
 So I want you to meet these two characters and get a chance to see them as I do, because while the book for me as a whole was sort of 'meh', the characters were definitely not. 
 The Review 
 "Dark Triumph" was a much darker book than "Grave Mercy". Sybella has a very tortured past. Do you remember when Ismae described Sybella when she fist came to the convent? Yeah,Ismae basically said she was feral. Well, over the course of the book, we're fed these little nuggets of information to sate our curiosity, but it's rather merciful in my opinion that the details of these events are left out. Suffice to say, it makes sense why Sybella is the way she is. 
 Many reviewers who've read the whole series agree, Sybella is their favorite of three girls the series follows. And now after having read "Dark Triumph" am happy to say that I whole-heartedly agree. Sybella has really overcome a lot and she's such an overall badass with a penchant for daggers, which, to be fair, is sort of a requisite for me to fall in love with any character. (The badass part, not the daggers. Though I'm sure the daggers help.) But if I'm being completely honest, I think I liked Beast even more. In the first book he's described as this horribly ugly man, which even though Ismae said it, I still couldn't quite picture it. He seemed too, well, I don't know, awesome to be all that ugly. So the whole, he's-got a-horrible-face-to-look-at thing, never really connected with me. It wasn't until we see him through Sybella's lens that I started to appreciate what Ismae probably meant. What I mean, is that Beast just isn't her type. Like, I imaged Duval as achingly beautiful. So, basically a pretty boy. Beast, he has that scar running down half his face, but despite that I always pictured his rugged handsomeness to be more manly. So, to me, that just makes his face have more character. Whatever, Beast's attractiveness is not at all important to the story. Sorry for the random deviation, what is important to the story though is who he is as a person, his perspective on life, how he balances Sybella out and how he doesn't try to bring her down. He's not intimidated by her. Any man in his right mind should be. But Beast? Nope. He admires her. *Swoon* Yep, I'm in love. Together, they fight through tough situations both physically and metaphorically and it's really a beautiful friendship. 
 Despite all of that, the book's weakness lies in the fact that it focuses on trying to stay close to historically accurate and I don't think it really needed to. I'm sure there are sticklers out there for historical details, and any deviation from those details pains those people, but me not being one of them, I honestly felt a bit jostled around when things were moving in the plot too quickly just to align with some timeline that, frankly, I had no clue about because I'm not a historian. 
 So my biggest criticism for this book is the lack of flexibility. LaFevers does deviate from history, which she explains those deviations in an afterword at the end of the book, but for me I think I would have preferred a story that was more true to the characters and less true to history. I am, however, looking forward to finishing the series with "Mortal Heart". I have it on good authority, aka another book blogger, that LaFevers didn't focus on historical accuracy as much for that one. So, I am looking forward to more focus on character and more flexibility on the storyline in the conclusion to this series. 
 Furthermore, I'd recommend any writer who is looking for an example of how to balance a dark character with a their corresponding character foil to read this book. The friendship between Sybella and Beast is great, so much so that I really would have liked to see more of it. 
 Rating 3.5/5