JLeighBralick

Torn between 2 and 3 stars for this one. It read easily enough, but it felt so boring and action-deprived (exactly what really happened in those 500 pages?) that I was inclined to give it 2, but there were certain flashes of interesting character development that raised it a bit in my estimation. Jem's reaction to Will's visit to the ifrit den for one, and the way the honor/love parabatai bond played into the romantic plot at the end for another. All in all, it boasted way too much angsting over who loved who and who couldn't love who, and literally every other page had some kind of reference to how beautiful Will was, or perfect Jem was, or how angelic and devastatingly stunning, or how silver/blue their eyes are, or how silky their hair is tumbling across their godlike brows...it about made me want to scream every time I saw the word "beautiful." And until the very end, that was pretty much the only way Tessa thought about Will, but she still had the ignorance to wonder if it was her truest true love? I wouldn't even call it a love-triangle...more like a physical infatuation triangle, except her affection for Jem was much more believable...

I found Tessa's behavior from night 1 to night 2 (yes, you know the events I'm talking about) to be just despicable. For someone who doesn't know if she cares about EITHER person in that way to treat them like that, at the risk of building up hopes and expectations she will have to crush for the one or the other, is totally selfish, cowardly, and inexcusable. I don't care what Tessa says about why she did what she did on the balcony...we all know she is capable of acting that way when she isn't demon-drugged, so why is it uncharacteristic in this situation? After all, she'd only spent the first flipping book and a half lusting after the guy's body (because, as she repeatedly tells us, she despises him as a person.) Wow, that's admirable.

(On a side note, how could Tessa have possibly stayed conscious for more than a few minutes in a corset designed for someone half her size? Anyone who's actually worn a corset knows that the ones fitted to you are bad enough. Anything smaller would be cripplingly painful, not to mention actually dangerous to one's health.)