Isabella

“Do you really believe people are so isolated that when they're gone, nothing grows in their place? To kill something, you have to kill everything. You have to raze it to the ground.”

I hate almost every trope that was used in this book but yeah I guess he is kind of sexy unfortunately

“I'm always crying.” I say, dashing the tears from my face.
“Hally's always crying too. Mom says it's because she had a past life and it keeps sneaking back in.”

I had to claw my way through this book to the point that it's set me back on my reading goal for the year.
I wanted so bad to like this book, I tried so hard to get into it but none of it seemed like it wanted to tell a story more than it wanted to be meaninglessly edgy. It tries so hard to achieve an artistic twist on the grotesque but ends up just being too consumed in that and loses its grasp on anything else it wants to convey, I fear.

Toward the end I started to get into it a bit more but it just didn't seem worth it considering the other 300 pages were such a drag.

I'm not saying it's inherently a terrible book it just really didn't give me anything I wanted and at times feels like a cheap knockoff of a lot of other sci fi and fantasy I've encountered.

“there are many thresholds, i'm learning, with a body that is bad and then good and then bad again.”

“I suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can , except sentimentalists.”

I always find it a little pointless to comment on anything considered a classic. Everything to be said has already been said.
But this novel has always stuck with me, even when i first read it years ago and didnt really understand the crux of it.
Sometimes i'm still unsure i do.

The detrimental effects of influence that one person can inflict on another is genuinely terrifying — how one person can entirely alter the makeup of another person just by exisiting and relaying themselves, even if the former doesn't entirely mean to do this.
I have this odd concern about myself all the time — that i'm not really my own person but just a makeup of all the people around me and all the things and art I consume. That i'm nothing but flesh and bone and mannerisms and ideals and jokes that inherently aren't mine.
In this book, Lord Henry says that art has no influence upon action, that we can indulge in it without being privy to it. He doesn't see art for what it can be, what it becomes for Dorian.
Poison.

i...i need a moment.

Made me want to throw up a various points, and I say that with high regard.

Something I always adore about Olivie's writing is her talent for writing people. Each one of her characters is so rounded and understood to the point that they're really the only important part of the series. Sure there's a well curated plot and well-researched background, but none of it would matter without this group of six unreliable, witty, selfish, and arrogant medians that somehow all have an irresistible air about them.

Did make my brain hurt though and like I'm all about some interpretational factors but sometimes can you just give me a straight answer Olivie, don't play with me. My emotions are on a high and I don't know what to believe.

I feel like this book was a whole lot of building toward something that never comes to fruition and not one character has any serious development.
Despite there being a massive dragon on the cover, one only appears for all of about 4 pages in the last 15 pages.

I, too, am a caffeine addicted rat.

not my proudest read

All of this would be avoidable if Elfhame just got a faerie therapist.

if it's wrong to love the immoral and vengeful ginger fey villain then i don't want to be right

and i'm just meant to go on after this?

This is a fantastic book series, although, if I must choose, this would have to be the least good book in the entire series