A Venom Dark and Sweet

3.5 rounded up

Maaaan I'm conflicted! While I loved and enjoyed the plot of this story (and the first book too), I think the writing was more tell-not-show so it wasn't captivating and jaw-dropping. The story was delivered with literal actions/descriptions. Something that I did enjoy in this book was the first-person POV of Ning shifting to having an additional POV of Kang but in third-person. I felt like making both of them consistent would have been nice, even having Kang's first-person POV would've been cool!

(spoilers for the whole duology) In this book, there was a lot of death in addition to the first book, which was.. understandable (since it's a war), maybe to grip the reader, but it felt "unnecessary"? The ending felt terribly rushed, and Ning mentioned the kiss with Kang so many times, you'd expect them to kiss at the end, right? (well, that's what I expected, and it didn't deliver LOL) I also wished we knew the whereabouts of all these other characters that came up in between, like the kitchen staff, which were a great part of Ning's competition in book one. ):

Regardless, I enjoyed the duology and being on this journey.