It was hard to rate this book, because it’s hard to rate any well-crafted book that I didn’t enjoy. I want to be clear that I’m definitely in the extreme minority based on the stellar reviews and the many awards this series has earned, so definitely keep in mind that my experience seems to be a rare one that is probably more reflective of me and my personal tastes than the book itself.

The good, which many people have already expounded on:

Jemison definitely has a clear creative vision and writes a story that executes on her thematic goals (which in this book I would say are to illustrate the burdens of immense power, motherhood, and generational trauma in a world of extreme inequality). Structurally, her writing takes risks and plays with reader expectations, and the plot is well-crafted on a technical level. The characters are unique, and the world-building is inventive, so in a genre known for feeling a bit derivative, it feels very distinct compared to everything else on offer.

But I think for a hugely beloved book like this, it’s less about “why did I give it 2.5 whole stars” and more about “why did I NOT give it 5 stars?” Honestly, it was just really hard for me to appreciate any of these good aspects because I absolutely did not enjoy the narrative style, and unfortunately, that permeates into literally every other facet of the book. I’ll start with my main complaints, starting from most subjective to least (but still very much) subjective.

Firstly, this is very much a personal preference and not indicative of quality at all, but I’ve realized Jemison’s writing style is just really not for me. I’ve read her book The City We Became too, and while I enjoyed that premise more simply because the NYC gimmick panders directly to me as a city resident, the writing there was still a huge sticking point for me. It seems to be a polarizing style in general, so I’m going to describe it as best I can in case anyone’s preferences align with my own and wants to know what to expect.

Jemison’s writing style is very stripped back, blunt, often gritty, with no floweriness or supporting exposition to ease you into the reading journey. There is an emphatic rejection of what she calls “polite abstraction” in favor of “vulgar actuality.” Refusing to let the reader romanticize even a single inch, she seems to want to reflect the inherent ugliness of the world in her work (whichever world she’s currently playing in) and often viscerally describes sweat, grime, mold, feces, fetid air, brutal violence, extreme poverty, bodies twisted by neglect and abuse, etc. (The hyper-fixation on filth in particular is a pattern in her descriptive writing, and it just doesn’t agree with me or my stomach.) There is a strong emphasis on heightened bodily sensations, even with the magic system, which brings an intense physicality to the storytelling. Thematically, she uses this raw physicality to explore the bleak effects of generational trauma, systemic oppression, large-scale violence, and societal cruelty.

All of this is presented with a heavier tone, and any shred of humor is limited to the occasional dry, ironic comment. While I wouldn’t call it overly dark in the vein of horror or anything, all of this put together still makes for a rather grim, stressful, uneasy reading experience that is really hard for me to call “enjoyment.” Not that everything needs to be, but this is not a “fun” read by any measure of the imagination — you will be made to sit with a high measure of discomfort all the way through, ranging from utter confusion to total disgust, and your tolerance of that will decide how rewarding this experience will be.

To be clear, I’m no stranger to more challenging reads — I can recognize when an author is intentionally trying to create discomfort, and god knows I certainly don’t require 100% sunshine rainbow vibes all the time, but constant misery against a backdrop of constant suffering creates what amounts to a flat, low-contrast emotional landscape that I find it dull and frankly exhausting to exist inside of. And then there are grating phrases like “cock on oily cock” 🥴 which were certainly memorable but in a truly negative way for me.

Again, this is my gut reaction to her stylistic choices and not necessarily a knock on the quality of the writing – this is clearly what she’s going for, and it seems a fitting choice for both the subject matter at hand and the way that she wants to explore it. Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable after all. I see the vision! My tastes just lean toward prose that can be described as “lyrical” and “lush” even when exploring darker topics rather than “visceral” and “grounded.” I have to be in a very specific headspace to appreciate the latter, and to be honest, I’m not sure I’ll ever really be in the headspace to reach for Jemison’s particular brand again as every reading session left me feeling vaguely nauseous and in need of a bath (there’s a lot of grime in this book).

Still, I think I would’ve been able to put aside my personal reaction to the stylistic choices here if I still managed to care deeply about the characters and the journey. The fact that I was unable to boil down to a few specific things:

One particularly controversial narrative choice here is the use of the second-person perspective. I usually love second-person when it’s done well, but its use here feels mostly gimmicky to me, especially because it’s only retroactively justified via a very late-breaking reveal at the end of the book. It just feels like a cheap trick to jumpstart reader engagement by arbitrarily obscuring information with an unusual writing choice and withholding emotional closeness with the character for drama without any attempt to supplement the characterization to fit the form, and it really didn’t work for me. As @brandanadei said in her review, second-person is hard to execute because it’s both intimate and distancing – there can be intimacy in being directly addressed as a reader, but also further distance in that we don’t get the benefit of the character behaving as if they're not being watched or expressing themselves in their own words. We don’t get any intimacy here – the voice in these chapters generally just feels disembodied and flat, to the detriment of reader connection with the character. Who is this person outside of the actions they’re you’re currently carrying out? It starts to read like a robotic text-based video game where the constant “you do this and then this” in the narration makes it feel strangely empty despite the emotional stakes supposedly present. By the time it’s explained why the second-person perspective is used, it has already affected too much of the story and characterization for me to appreciate how clever the choice was, because it feels way too late to justify what was a core stylistic choice from page 1.

This was especially an issue for me because the other two POVs also felt incredibly flat and detached in their own way, despite being written in third person. Is there an in-universe reason for this? Sure. Trauma. Naturally. All three POV characters are (understandably) scarred by their brutal life experiences, and the result is, apparently, three almost identically emotionless narration styles that made it difficult for me to care about them as characters because they’re all remarkably removed from the events of their own lives. I found them all pretty unsympathetic, but this was exacerbated by the fact that I couldn’t even relate to them when I was inside their own heads. They all felt so lifeless narratively that there was no humanity or vulnerability for me to latch onto to be able to say “ah yes, now I can somewhat understand being an unrepentant mass murderer.” I never cared enough about any single POV to want to keep turning the page, making reading this feel like a total chore.

Also, I had guessed the plot “twist” extremely early on, so my ability to be mind-blown by the reveal was very limited. Based on others’ reviews, I think this was a big part of people’s enjoyment of the book that I just didn’t get to experience. It was frustrating to have guessed it 5% into the book and then have to wait so long for the slow reveal. Felt very prolonged in an unsatisfying way, like the author was just refusing to address something that had been very clear to me for several hundred pages. However, I think not knowing about the twist at all would’ve dampened my emotional investment even further, so part of me is glad I at least had that to hold onto.

Finishing this book was a real struggle for me, but I can understand what people see in this book and appreciate what Jemison is trying to do, even if it was not for me. In many ways, I am at the very least glad to see an experimental, diverse, and queernormative fantasy be so well received, which is why the dedication of the book is the part that worked the most for me: “For all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question.” This is a great summary of what living life is like with a marginalized identity, and I'm sure it hits home for many readers.

Ashlee was right, this story IS super sad face.

This book is structured around five women, each a modern take on a well-known fairy tale character, taking turns monologuing their own tragic backstory as part of a group therapy session led by a male facilitator. Specifically, it’s pulling from the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Cinderella, Hansel & Gretel, and Rumplestiltskin. This setup began pretty intriguingly and then quickly spiraled into a hot mess.

I think the cover subconsciously made me believe this would read more literary than it does, and the modern fairy tale premise was high-concept enough that it felt like there was room to do something really thoughtful and interesting. Instead, I got pretty surface level critiques of reality TV, tabloid culture, social media, and modern dating. “It’s like the us we see on TV or online or whatever isn’t even us.” Groundbreaking stuff.

First, the group therapy structure honestly did the story no favors, as splicing it into six separate unrelated flashbacks means you get very few interactions between the characters themselves during the sessions, which is a missed opportunity to develop some interesting cross-relationships. Secondly, these monologues are very uneven in their level of intensity and intrigue, making some of them much less engaging than others. Unfortunately, this means if you’re not vibing with one character, you’re shit out of luck for a long portion of the book until their turn is over. And if you really like a character, you won’t really hear from them again once you’re past their chapter.

And then there are the characters. I hated everyone in this book, and not in a fun way. I obviously don’t subscribe to the idea of a perfect victim, and fully understand that survivors of trauma can often come across as off-putting due to unhealthy coping mechanisms from their experiences. Still though, being a survivor doesn’t automatically make for an interesting character either, and I found this particular group of women neither likable nor compelling. They don't feel well-developed at all and read more like archetypes than real women, which begs the question why they were lifted from their allegorical fairy tale contexts in the first place if they were going to remain so flat.

The writing did not help the characterization either, because it did not maintain each woman’s “voice” very well between the chapters — the author has a penchant for wordy, descriptive prose that is present in every single character’s POV chapter, regardless of whether that makes sense for that specific character. Even the silly, vapid character who admits to “thinking in emojis” will have jarring passages where she randomly thinks “wilting rose emoji” followed by a long, detailed passage expounding on the color and velvety texture of those rose petals. The perspectives are not differentiated enough in the writing, so they all read as identical, which further dampened my engagement.

Ironically, the most interesting and well-written character to me was Will, the only male character, which feels a bit odd in a book that bills itself as a modern, feminist take on fairy tales. Without getting into spoilers, I felt that his character and role as the facilitator of these group sessions portrayed an interesting critique of the storyteller as a concept and what responsibilities, if any, storytellers actually owe to the subjects of their stories. I read Will as an amalgamation of all the famous (male) fairy tale creators (Hans Christian Andersen, the Grimm Brothers, Charles Perrault, etc.), and his role in this story as a criticism of these writers, questioning how comfortable they felt depicting violence toward women in their tales for entertainment purposes. This then acts as a jumping-off point to critique modern mass media at large, and the dangerous stories society spins about vulnerable people in news cycles, true crime documentaries, reality TV, tabloids, etc.

Ultimately, this book aims to explore the power of storytelling (whether in books, television, or rumors spread by word of mouth), the conditions under which these stories are crafted, and by whom. Clearly, stories can be weaponized to do real and lasting harm when they are written from the outside with no input from or empathy for the people in them. And in a world where news outlets and TV producers are our modern storytellers, with the morbid trauma-porn human interest pieces they create our modern morality tales, that negative impact becomes very real. I do understand what the author is attempting to do here, but since Will's character is the only element of the book I found successful at conveying this message, the thematic exploration falls a little flat to me.

I do think we eventually have to ask ourselves with these kinds of modern fairy tale retellings what subtlety and artistry is lost when you take the story out of the figurative world and thrust it into the literal one. For instance, when you take Little Red Riding Hood, which is already itself a tale about lost innocence, sexuality, and predatory relationships, and turn that into a literal age gap relationship in the modern world, what new angle is that actually bringing to the table? What nuance is it flattening about the story when the allegorical aspects are erased to make it less universal? Like with many other so-called feminist fairy tale retellings these days, I personally don’t think this interpretation was executed well, and any success it does have is due to the flexibility of the original story and not the adaptation. For me, this came across as shallowly as the plethora of Disney Princess parodies on YouTube during the 2010s (shout out to Paint's 🔗After Ever After, the OG!).

I’ll also note that this is pretty light in terms of horror elements, so traditional horror fans may be disappointed by the lack of atmosphere or sense of imminent threat. It certainly covers some mentally distressing topics, but does not go much beyond what a typical dark fable would contain.

Fair warning, this will be a pretty mean-spirited hater review with exactly zero of the generosity or constructive criticism I typically extend to the book or the author, and I don’t pretend that it’s anything different. I still stand by it, but feel free to look away if that’s not something you’re down for.

Hench really should've been a standalone.

I have such a love-hate relationship with this series. On the one hand, the comic book vibes are super fun, and the plot-forward nature of the story combined with the fast pacing means it’s hard to ever get bored (at least in the first book). On the other hand, I found both books extremely poorly written from a craft perspective, with incredibly amateur prose and a distinctly fluffy fanfic feel to it all. It’s the kind of rough combination that usually points to an author who would’ve rather written a YA graphic novel or video game narrative but logistically had to settle for a novel instead (the author’s background is in interactive fiction, specifically LARP scripts and the like, so I don’t think I’m too far off-base here).

Unfortunately, all of the raw entertainment value from Hench left the building in this sequel where practically nothing happened, so all I’m left with is the terrible writing — this time riddled with a metric ton of spelling and grammatical errors. Did an editor look at this at all? Taking 6 whole years to write a sequel that still feels this rushed in execution is crazy work. She couldn’t have turned on spellcheck once during that time? It’s mentioned in the author’s note that it took 4 attempts rewriting from scratch to finish this book and, I gotta say, if this is the result, I don’t think 4 attempts were nearly enough, and we need to take things back to the fucking drawing board. It’ll probably take the better part of a decade for the next book to come out and finally resolve this cliffhanger(!), in which case, I’ll be tapping out here.

Similar to the first book, this doesn’t do a single thoughtful thing with its juicy premise of deconstructing comic book tropes, despite now taking almost a thousand pages to explore this (so far). In this world, heroes are the militant fascist oppressors and villains are the scrappy underdog rebels, which is just a disappointingly un-nuanced take on the superhero trope. Supervillains here are nothing more than world-class pranksters — wacky and annoying to work for but never any real threat to social order. (Everyone, point and laugh at the supervillain who has to call tech support to figure out how to turn off his death ray! Isn’t that just peak comedy??)

Superheroes, conversely, manage to be the manifestation of every form of organized oppression and violence that could ever exist in society. They’re all so comically evil and devoid of empathy that the book encourages you to feel zero remorse about systematically destroying their lives, simplifying any moral ambiguity that could exist here. It’s an incredibly shallow exploration of what heroism represents in society, and diluting the age-old conflict to essentially corporate politics between equally selfish factions really hamstrings what little social critique is attempted here.

There’s never any effort made to question what a turn to capital-V Villainy actually means or how that changes a person, and what ends actually justify the means, whether you ultimately call it heroism or villainy. It’s content to just say “heroes bad, villains good” and call it a day. The book is much more interested in whether Anna fucks her boss (she does), the silly found family shenanigans that occur when working in a supervillain crew (there are many), and squeezing in quirky #relatable humor throughout (“I am about as slutty as a gnome,” “what level of eyeliner is appropriate for a funeral bc I want to look hot 😜” girl idk and idc)… but what other kind of humor could I expect from an author who has “memesmith” in her byline and “most mornings opens Tumblr before opening her eyes” (I can tell).

The author took far too long between the first and second books, so any momentum was lost. It feels like she completely ran out of things to say with this second book, so any angle that existed in Hench is missing here — this was quite possibly the blandest corporate satire I’ve ever read. I also think the “villains are bad but at least they’re honest about it which makes it ok 🤷‍♀️” attitude and leaving it there for two whole books is an intellectually lazy way to engage with villainy as a force of real harm in the world. Like, both heroes and villains use excessive force and cause extreme collateral damage in this universe. At least heroes manage to save some people in the process despite their hypocrisy? Why do villains get a pass for this just because they’re self-aware? Why are we asked to take some harms seriously but not others?

This book was also way too long — almost 500 pages — for what is essentially a collection of therapy-speak buzzword-soup conversations about people’s individual feelings (“weaponized vulnerability,” “bid for false intimacy,” “trauma under the guise of understanding,” “disordered thinking developed over a lifetime of unhealthy relationships and toxic cultural expectations,” etc.). Not only is this not really what I signed up for when picking up a supervillain novel, but it also reads as insanely chronically online. I half expected her to bust out “emotional labor,” “attachment theory,” maybe even “healing your inner child.” People are not this emotionally self-aware and do not communicate like this in real life, especially outside of a mental health context! And despite all this pseudo-intellectual babble, the characters still choose to misunderstand each other anyway, so it’s doubly frustrating to sit through.

Flipping from a plot-driven to a character-driven story when the characters are basically hollow vehicles for plot was definitely a choice. Living inside Anna’s smug, condescending, petty brain was a trial I wouldn’t wish on my (arch)enemy. The constant glazing of Anna as some kind of super-genius playing 4D chess when the best she ever came up with was basic social engineering became increasingly irritating — let’s all stop pretending, the woman is just not very smart! It takes a very smart author to write a very smart character, and she really just doesn’t have the chops. (As someone who actually works in corporate strategy and data analytics, Anna’s “skills” are incredibly entry-level for the industry. She would be laughed out of the room at my company. The mind games that occur in a regular Monday morning sync here would clear anything Anna ever did.)

The fact that she is constantly tooting her own horn in her own internal monologue takes her unfounded belief in her own brilliance from simply annoying to truly insufferable. And she has the nerve to call someone else’s hero moniker “kind of cringe” in this book? Girl, look in the mirror! You literally call yourself “The Auditor,” you have no room to talk!! She is a terrible person, a terrible friend, and worst of all, a terrible villain. In many ways, Anna reads as the author’s indulgent self-insert, her feminist fursona, if you will, one who makes incel men mald and seethe (or, in her words, “tremble” and “explode into a shower of expletives”) with the strength of her razor wit and killer instincts alone 🙄 And you know what's SO feminist? Giving up all your sense of privacy, agency, and independence for your new abusive boyfriend.

In terms of the romance, Leviathon needs to pick a lane as a love interest — you can be ugly or boring, but not both. Fucking a literal bug-man should not be nearly as dull of an experience as it was. I also think that a dark, vaguely BDSM relationship with undertones of domestic abuse, surveillance, and coercion reminiscent of Harley Quinn and Joker feels jarring for the goofy, unserious world we’re in, and the way the toxic dynamics were written comes across as remarkably unskilled and clumsy. Anna immediately turning into a mindlessly obedient, lovesick puppy, excusing every violation at the first taste of bug dick mandible(?) was so disappointing. She ends Hench ready to come into her own as a supervillain but then spends the first ~40% of this book being Leviathon's lapdog, just waiting around for him to order her to do something. There is technically a second love interest as well, but the love triangle is so poorly done it may as well not exist.

Lastly, the sheer quantity of typos, continuity errors, and repetitive phrases implies an egregious lack of editing for a traditionally published book. The relentlessly cringy snark that the author tries to pass off as “banter” is astoundingly juvenile and makes for particularly grating dialogue, especially when the text immediately pats itself on the back for how supposedly clever the clapback was. (Anna literally calls someone an asshole and then thinks “I love knowing just the right way to get under someone’s skin” as if that’s some unique and targeted insult?? What are we, 12??) I think openly comping this to Assistant to the Villain is… probably accurate in terms of the level of writing quality you can expect. Shame on me, honestly, for expecting any more depth than that.

Audiobook Note: I really didn’t enjoy Alex McKenna’s narration. She seemed to project an overly snarky and taunting tone throughout the book, which got old very fast. Every single line was delivered as smugly mocking, almost singsong, which, along with her loud and gravelly voice texture undermining any moments of vulnerability, made Anna sound like the most insufferably arrogant person alive. She also made strange and grating choices for the secondary characters that I found hard to listen to, especially the voice she does for Leviathon. In 2026, the last thing I need is RFK Jr’s voice in my ear during a sex scene that involves antennae. Genuinely, what did I do to deserve that 😩