Content Warnings:

Graphic: Miscarriage, Pregnancy, Death of a Child, Sexual Assault, Rape (Off page but with descriptions), Misogyny, Death of a Parent, Gore, Violence, Murder, Blood, Death.. It's a Celtic mythology retelling that's decently accurate, I'm not sure what you expect other than like, every content warning 😅

Thank you Netgalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review! This ran at a break-neck pace and left nothing room to breathe. So many characters, so many lives - but everything is just told to us in short snippets and barely anything is actually just shown. There's so much dialogue just of exposition and explaining constantly. The characters where a mix, quite a few of them felt very flat honestly and despite that seemingly being intentional (Little time with characters, mostly only focusing on 1 or 2 aspects of each, etc), it kinda just blurred most of them together. The main character, The Morrigan, was good though. She was strong, powerful, stubborn, but had a good range of emotions still and was a really compelling main character! I just honestly wish we had more time for her to properly go through each scene though instead of quick snippets. The pronunciation guide as well.. I'm quite heavily dyslexic, and while I've been learning Welsh that doesn't help with Irish too much haha. It's a fantastic guide, but it is *very* long. I read this in an ebook form and it was really frustrating having to keep going back to the guide and then reading through all of them again to try and find the 1 name I wanted. There's too many names to just remember, especially after the first "part" or so, and once you get closer to the end you're just not going to remember the new names' pronunciations. Imo it might have been better to keep the pronunciation note at the start, but then put the pronunciations when the names first come up in the book? Not perfect, but I'm sure there's a decent way to format that. Would be much easier to remember them and a lot easier to read! I'm not Irish, and Welsh + Scottish mythology is more my wheelhouse but this book does seem to be faithful enough and certainly respectful obviously. The author is Irish and very clearly loves the tales of old and that comes through! It's certainly something that's absolutely needed in this current era of American fantasy attempting to take over and erase Celtic mythology in the worst of ways. I just think that it was maybe trying to fit too many individual stories about her into the same book. I think there is too many duologies currently being made, but this might have benefitted from having more room to breathe.