I want to vomit. Are you kidding me.
Okay, let’s start.
Cage. That’s it. That’s the review.
But really, I love that we don’t just see Millicent being a bad ass in those caves, we also see her being thrown into the pits of hell to claw her way out. It’s not that she’s so overpowered she has no reason to feel fear, it’s that she’s faced such horrors that she fully understands fear doesn’t serve her. Having characters that just show up and show out is fine but it doesn’t do anything for me. Showing us how a character got to that point without expecting us to just know they’re super cool and awesome and totally capable? That’s where it’s at.
“Slow burn” is not enough to adequately describe the dynamic here. This is the fire you try to build with your best friend next to the pond outside her house at 10pm one summer night when you’re 14 and stupid and don’t know how to build a fire but have all the confidence of a survivalist. Over 200 pages in and I’m sobbing for them to CATCH ALREADY. The back and forth, the banter, the tempting, I cannot handle this.
<“Can’t she let it die too?” Baby, maybe try an apology. Men are so dense and while Cage may be a special kind of man, he’s still a man.> My original take but then I thought about it for literally 3 more seconds and remembered what he went through at the hands of her coven and that he thinks she knows. Everyone’s damned, traumatized, and lacking in communication skills and the ability to trust. What he needs is a therapist and to confide in his friends about his conflicting feelings for Millicent and everything he endured, how the two relate to each other.
Cage absolutely losing his mind, utterly confused and there’s me chanting “FALL, FALL, FALL”.
Grotesquely and beautifully detailed. Really, some scenes had me sick to my stomach with the descriptive imagery and some had me blushing like a little school girl.
The Cage and Millie flashbacks feel like actual torture because holy wholesome. Those children? They deserved better than everything that coven gave them.
Okay, this is a long book, so I feel the need to justify why I’m not shitting on it for the fact that it’s long. With Ruthless Boys and Zodiac Academy, my qualm wasn’t that they’re long, my qualm was that they were unfocused. Malicent is SO focused. It’s tight, it’s thorough, it’s thought out. It’s not all over the place trying to do all kinds of things without actually knowing what it wants to do. The magic system is robust, the world building is succinct, the details are exquisite. There were bits that dragged just slightly for me, but that was more because I kept having to pause and come back to them due to life things. But everything was done so beautifully, it all tied together so perfectly, and I was desperately eating it up. Because it knew exactly what it was trying to be, exactly what it was trying to do, exactly what it was trying to convey. I knew exactly what I was reading through every paragraph even if I didn’t know where it was going.
I think the main thing is that Cassandra put the majority of her focus into the plot of this book rather than the romance of it. The romance is a hellscape of torture for the reader as a bonus, but it’s certainly not the central focus of the book. With the Zodiac universe, every series is a romance with fantastical elements and it shows. This is a horror thriller type with some romantic elements. And god, I’m so feral for it.
0 comments