A Court This Cruel and Lovely

I really enjoyed this book.

At first I was a bit confused because it seemed like nothing was going on and the story was very straightforward - our main character had one goal in mind and planned to do whatever to follow it. About 20% - 30% of the way in I found myself asking “Is this is?” but I'm usually pretty good at giving authors the benefit of the doubt and I'm glad I held out, because this story was anything but straightforward.

I kind of liked this style of writing of letting layers be added over time (even up to the very end of the book), rather than being hosed with a bunch of information I can't possibly understand right off the bat and slowly understanding more as the story goes on. Maybe my ADHD brain felt less stressed at getting a trickle of information throughout, rather than having to remember and keep straight details to understand later. (To be clear, though, I do like and appreciate both styles of writing)

I liked Prisca. She can hold her own and she's got sass. She's also not preternaturally talented, which I appreciated. I knew I would like Lorian from the first time he interacted with Prisca, and I still liked him at the end. Stark had me hooked early on and I became very impatient for them to get together (in a good way).

One thing that bothered me was that Prisca didn't seem to explore some things that a normal person presumably wood. For instance, she's raised her entire life to fear the fae, but when she finds out she's a 'hybrid' (half-fae, half-human) she just kind of shrugs and moves on. Like I would expect her to war with that a lot more instead of just accepting it. There were a couple of other bits of info like this that I found distracting, but overall it didn't take away too much from the story for me.

All in all, I've already downloaded the second book and I can't wait to start reading it right after I post this review.