It's kind of hard to put my feelings for Nevernight into words. An over-simplified, albeit true, statement would be to say that I loved it. Another over-simplified, albeit true, statement would be to say that I feel overwhelmed at the sheer amount of book I just read. There was just sooooo much to take in in Nevernight that I'm feeling a bit hungover in describing my feelings. But whatever, here goes nothing... 
 Nevernight is the story of Mia, a 16 year old girl on a mission to avenge her family's deaths. The best way for her to go about doing this is to become a blade (aka assassin) of the Red Church. Basically, the Red Church is to murderers as what Hogwarts is to wizards. Mia is a complex main character. On the one hand, she's super cool with murder (seriously, she easily kills off over a hundred people in the story) as long as the person deserves it. However, on the other hand, she is intensely loyal to those she cares about and can genuinely feel compassion for others. So while she's a cold blooded killer she's not exactly a sociopath. She has her own moral code for right and wrong and I like that she has a strong personality. She's definitely no damsel and I loved her intensely. 
 I loved that Nevernight was adult fiction rather than just another YA story. Yes, the protagonist is a 16 year old girl but her story isn't being told or lived through the eyes of an adolescent. She feels like an adult regardless of her physical age. I feel like if the story was paired down to fit into the YA it wouldn't have been anything special. I think the "MA" nature of this (i.e.: the sex and violence) helped the story become a much richer reading experience. 
 **On a personal side note: I was intrigued by the idea of reading the smutty bits written by a male author. I read a lot of smut but almost exclusively the smut is written by a woman. I wondered if the male perspective would make the scenes come off differently. While they did come off as if a man was writing them, I have to admit that they were pretty decent. I think the biggest difference I noticed was that different aspects of the act were looked at in more detail than others. For example, (view spoiler)[after Mia is with Tric sexually, she thinks about how sex makes her powerful rather than considering being emotionally invested in a relationship. (hide spoiler)]** 
 The only hindrance is the writing style. At times I felt like Jay Kristoff was just cramming stuff into the story to the point of overflowing. The footnotes are quite insightful and useful in the continued understanding of the world building. The only thing is that there was so much written in the footnotes that I felt like it could have been its own novella. It made the writing seem incredibly dense at times rather than just letting the story flow in the present. However, at the same time, there were quite a lot of gems in the footnotes that I really enjoyed reading. This may be kind of a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" type of situation. Jay Kristoff accomplished a "Tolkien" like level of world building here and through the footnotes we get to learn the rich and complex history in which the story takes place. On the other hand, it makes reading quite cumbersome to have tons of facts crammed into the narrative all the time. 
 Overall, I would say I'm entirely taken with Nevernight. It has this essence that's really quite hard to describe. This may sound really far off but it kind of feels like Monty Python and Kill Bill made high fantasy baby and named it Nevernight and sent it off to a Hogwarts for murder. I mean this in the most amazing way possible. I already bought the sequel, Godsgrave, and I can't wait to continue on with Mia's story.