Summary: Nesta has to grapple with her demons.
In some ways I think I liked this more than the rest of the series. It is more contained. Nesta isn’t an easy character to like. And Cassian, the other main character at times feels a bit too idealized as a man.
This is a series that I initially picked up because my local school district banned it from the school libraries. It is an adult series with a lot of sex. But at the same time, there are a lot of other books that I think have a lot more problematic views of sex than this one does. Generally the series is sex positive in the sense that the people like having sex. It is mutual and consent oriented. But it is also very idealized and the super human people have super human sex.
This is a romantasy (romance and fantasy) series. But this book is less about the magic and fantasy battles than some of the others. All of that stuff is in the background, but not centered in the story.
Nesta has what I would classify in a non clinical way as PTSD. And she has chosen to deal with it by drinking herself drunk most days and sleeping with strangers when she isn’t too drunk to do so. Fairly early on in the book, her sister and brother in law (the king and queen equivalent in this series) banish her to a training area to see if that will shake her out of her trauma.
The book (and series) speak fairly clearly about trauma and its impacts. Those traumas are various, rape, war, developmental traumas from parents and others, etc. But it is also not clinically precise in dealing with trauma and so I worry about people reading the books as prescriptive. I appreciate that it names traumas and details the harm of those traumas. But I worry about how the healing that comes about in the series.
The series are very overt with their sex and descriptions. One of the problems on this book’s presentation of sex is that Nesta believes that she deserves pain and abuse because she blames herself for some of the traumas that have happened around her. And so she adopts some views of sex that I think are problematic because of her self identity.
Throughout the book there is no question that Nesta and Cassian are going to end up together and they will have plenty of sex along the way before they can admit to their love for one another. Part of the problem is that Nesta has to come out an equilibrium about both her role in causing harm to others and the ways that things happened around her that she both didn’t cause and couldn’t stop. Learning to fight and getting in shape to fight is part of what gives her some tools for self empowerment. And she also comes to find real friends, primarily other women who have also had abuse in their background as part of that process.
I thought this was a better book than the fourth book. And I thought that this was more character focused and less plot focused (in a good way for me) than the second and third books. So much of the tension is miscommunication and pride. And that gets a bit tedious at times. But as a fluffy book it wasn’t bad.