There's something to be said for a series that keeps me reading and reading and reading, no matter how irritated it's making me, no matter how furious I am with the characters, no matter how idiotic the romance is, and no matter how crushingly depressed it's making me. There's something to be said for a book that still gets four stars from me despite making me want to swallow a whole box of Niquil and take a nap for a year. 
 Take Karou. She's quirky, cool, popular. She's got a secret tooth-mongering life and her family is a hodgepodge of demonic deities whose appearances burst straight out of some antique high fantasy adventure saga. God, if I could write fantasy like Laini Taylor does, I'd be like Dan Brown and sleeping on a pile of money every night and laughing at some hi-larious joke my good friend Tom Hanks just cracked while servants offered us hot towels with which to wipe the caviar off our hands. The characters in this book are just so inspired. How do you go about dreaming all of this up? How do you conjure this sort of kaleidoscopic, dream-state world building? There are so many threads. So many layers. How do you do it? Do you pop a molly, open a word document with Pan's Labyrinth reeling in the background, and let it go? Don't hold it back anymore? Let it go, let it go, turn away and slam the door? 
 (Okay, I fucking love Frozen. It's my life and I know every word to every song. I told you not to judge me.) 
 Mik and Zuzanna were pointless but cute, and to be fair, they didn't really need to serve a purpose as characters. One character who did need to serve a purpose but didn't was Akiva, and let me get this straight right off the bat so that no one is under any sort of false pretenses: I hate Akiva. I hate Akiva like I hate those snapchat nerds who refused to sell when they were offered three billion dollars for some shitty little app that I can't even fucking work. Guys, a chimpanzee could create a picture messaging app that isn't even as fast as kik. I mean, if the Vine guys turned down a three billion dollar offer I'd understand because stuff like this is worth triple that amount, plus my first born child, plus some sort of soul exchange like they had in that movie, what was it called? The Skeleton Key? 
 Look, it's not even that Akiva is two-dimensional, and his and Karou's relationship has absolutely no basis whatsoever than both of them being hot. It's also not about how he thinks he loves Madrigal but what they had was sex, not love. It's the arrogance of him. It's just the entitlement of it: he arrives at the party Madrigal is attending and when he sees her dressed up, he decides that it's all for his benefit, and she must have been expecting him, because clearly we haven't been diligent enough in convincing girls that the clothes they put on their bodies are for men's benefit, and that their bodies are public property. I'm not sure why I'm surprised by this, because the chances of finding a piece of media that isn't in some way thematically problematic are slim, but still. We could all stand to try a little harder. 
 (We could all stand to take a step back and think about what it says when we praise and praise and praise a series that is, at its core, about how genocide is totally forgivable as long as the person who did it is really sorry and, like, was really sad and stuff. But that isn't really a fair criticism for this book; it's about this series as a whole, so let's not jump the gun.) 
 There's also this whole thing where Akiva tries to kill Karou, then creepily watches her while she'd sleeping, and suddenly they're in love after meeting each other a handful of small times and exchanging perhaps four angsty words. Who is eating this up? Why? We didn't put up with it when Kate and Adornetto did it, so why are we putting up with it now? Why are we putting up with another story in which an arrogant man decides that a pretty girl must be his and so stalks and frightens her until she falls into his arms? What the fuck is with this? 
 Emphasis on "pretty" needs to be discussed, too. This book adores physical beauty in flagrante and it isn't afraid to tell you straight up that if you're ugly, then you can fuck falling in love. You can fuck having an interesting story to tell. You may as well sit on someone else's back and suck their soul out. And when they've lost their soul, they'll be ugly too, because ugly people are evil and pretty people are the bestest. 
 This book also wants you to know that low self-esteem is beautiful too. Madrigal is annoyingly unaware of how stunning she is and apparently that makes her all the more lovely. We're kind of narrowing the dream pool here. You can only be happy or interesting or powerful if you're beautiful, but in order to be "good", you have to hate yourself for it. Thiago knows he's beautiful, so he's immediately the villain. Madrigal? Oh, she doesn't have a clue. She's a primrose of lovely unhappiness. 
 It's just so fucked in the head. Don't you think that's fucked in the head? I do. Though...ugh. Level with me. No matter how hard this book stumbles, I just can't bring myself to deduct another star. The writing was too haunting and lovely, and the mythology was too inspired, and the palpable love the author has for the story just bled too profusely from the pages. You can feel how invested she is. You can taste it. And I love that. I love it so much. Being able to smell the hours of pleasure and inspiration that were baked into a book, and to just know in your heart that an author truly and deeply cares. It's utterly beautiful. 
 I could keep waxing angry about the fucked-up themes of this book for hours, but this book really isn't any worse than the other offenders within its genre. (I could also sigh about the silliness of 'Prague, a storybook city stuck in the eighteenth century" but I won't. It's just a Quaint Little Europe cliche and it really isn't hurting anyone.) Actually, no; that's not quite right. It isn't that this book is "no worse". It's a lot better, really, in that it doesn't feel like it was thrown together within a couple of weeks, slapped with a pretty cover and sold as a 'forbidden love story for fans of Stephanie Meyer'. I'm being unfair, aren't I? 
 This book is not perfect, but I think about it often, and deeply. I think about certain words and wonder what the author was thinking when she wrote them down; I think about the titles, and how perfectly they dovetail with what's behind them; I think about Karou, and Brimstone, and Issa, and Kishmish, and even Akiva. It isn't necessary to like a character. It isn't even necessary to understand them. It's only necessary to be compelled by them, and I was compelled by every word on these pages. 
 That's got to count for something. 
 BONUS TIME! 
 Alright, alright, fuckin' right!