Rating: 2/5 
 ***Minor spoilers, spoilers for the previous books in the series*** 
 (I'm writing this from my phone so please excuse any errors!) 
 It's been a long, long time since I've read Days of Blood and Starlight. So long, in fact, that I didn't remember much from the series whatsoever. I had a general idea of what happened, and I had to spend the first portion of the book looking up definitions of things on Wikipedia and I was still a bit confused. This contributed to my low rating but I still had other reasons for disliking this book. 
 I'm pretty disappointed by this book. I'm pretty upset that I didn't enjoy it like so many other people did. Usually if I like the book, I can breeze through 600 pages within 2 days, but with this book I had to push myself to read it and it was a struggle to get through. It nearly put me to sleep a couple times. 
 This book starts off with the Misbegotten and Chimaera forming their alliance, with Ziri in Thiago's body. They must find a way to somehow get along so that they can defeat Jael and thwart his plans to get advanced weaponry from the humans. We're introduced to several new characters and we see our fair share of old ones. 
 Right off the bat, I had an issue with how many point of views were going on. We were hopping from Karou, then some new girl who I didn't know why I should care about, to Mik/Zuze, to the Stelian queen. And man, was it confusing. This on top of my shoddy memory left me barely able to keep up with the characters. 
 People describe Taylor's writing as beautiful, and at times, it is. But also, sometimes it's just downright confusing, like she's trying too hard to be poetic in her sentences. I have the utmost respect for how different authors write their books and I know they write in different styles, but I actually found her writing confusing at times. I had to reread some stuff several times before I understood what was being said. 
 The romance felt forced. I can appreciate a good romance. But why were Karou and Akiva even attracted to each other? I get that they were in love in Karou's previous life, but although Karou has Madrigal's soul, she isn't Madrigal. At times I felt like Karou only loved Akiva because she felt like she should, because her previous body did. I also had a problem with what happened between (view spoiler)[ Liraz and Ziri. How did that even happen? Liraz hated Chimaera. She thought Ziri was still Thiago. Sure, Ziri saved her, but how can you fall in love so fast? I swear she went from hating him to loving him in under an hour. (hide spoiler)] 
 Overall, this was a pretty big disappointment and it felt like a waste of my time. The story felt choppy and I had a lot of issues with it. I may come back to it for a reread or rerate if I reread the previous 2 books. If you enjoyed the previous 2 books, give it a try, because I know a lot of people enjoyed it, but I recommend not going in with super high expectations.