Lightlark

I am not a huge consumer of modern trope-y fantasy literature, but I did cut my teeth on Sarah J Maas' entire bibliography at the end of last year, because my wife loves all of it.

Fans of ACOTAR (like my wife) will probably like this a lot. For me, it's solidly “so okay it's average”. That said, Bean's exhaustive review is also 100% correct in substance so I won't repeat it here, just to say go read that review.

My biggest gripe though, has to be one of the core conceits around the main character. Namely [early plot spoilers] why would you give us a main character who grew up in a savage amazonian realm where the people eat hearts and can grow flowers with blood and are tragically fated to kill anyone they fall in love with so they're basically badass wendigos with nature powers... and then have said main character affected by exactly none of those unique and cool and interesting factors? It's literary cowardice. We could have had so many cool logistical conflicts, but now it's all replaced by a few throwaway lines about pretending to have those conflicts. Pulling a stunt like this doesn't make the main character unique, it makes her generic. The eventual reveal ([major ending spoiler]"Oh she had powers all along it was just cloaked by the other powers she also had all along, but somehow none of the curses that go with those powers?!") reads more like post-hoc justification for a poor character design choice.

Anyway, not a terrible book. But certainly a flawed one, which is unfortunate because it could have been really interesting if it wasn't so intent on checking all the genre boxes.