I put Half City off for a long time because urban fantasies are not my favorite and books with academy settings haven't been hitting for me lately. Needless to say, I'm quite surprised at how much I enjoyed this.

There are a couple of things I should mention right off the bat. First, I alternated between audiobook and eBook. Once the bulk of the worldbuilding is done in the beginning of the book, it's very easy to listen to. I can confidently recommend the audiobook, even if you struggle with following complex storylines through audio (like me).

The second thing is that although this takes place in a fantasy city, there are a lot of callbacks to the real world like movies, pop culture, Grindr, etc. The references aren't too plentiful, but they're present, so if that's the type of thing that pulls you out of stories, it's worth noting.

I have been craving a good found family and I think the one in this book stands out as a new favorite. Sophia, Peter, Elliot, and Penny were not just a friend group, but a group of people Viv felt at home with. I loved anytime they were on page together, and a lot of Viv's character development was tied to her finding her people for the first time. It was heartwarming in a really relatable way.

Speaking of Viv, some readers will find her a little hard to like, maybe even too self-pitying, but I saw this as a great starting point for her arc. Given all she's been through and how lonely she's felt as the only hunter of her type, her starting emotional state is believable. She periodically falls back into toxic thought patterns and self-sabotage, but overcoming trauma and self-hatred is rarely linear, and I appreciated how her growth was portrayed here.

I was enjoying the rest of the story so much that I found myself forgetting there was a romance subplot in the background. The story focusing more on plot and mystery gave the romance space to develop naturally. The spice and the connection between Viv and Reid felt earned. Also, it is a student-teacher/instructor relationship, which I tend to be wary of, but this one seemed relatively unproblematic, in my opinion.

The plot itself is a mystery/quest, which I tend to like. Though some of the twists are predictable, I did not see the ending coming and I have so many theories on where the story is going. But just a heads up, this does end on a cliffhanger with no closure on anything.

Definitely recommend if you like demon/hunter dynamics, urban fantasy, and training academy settings. I will be thinking about this book until the second one comes out this fall.

I have mixed feelings about this one. Overall, it was infinitely more interesting to me than The Rose Bargain but at times it moved a little too fast and the plot lacked direction.

The Thorn Queen picks up after the fallout of Ivy's wedding and follows her, Emmett, Lydia, and a few other characters on their mission to save England and the Otherworld from Bram and Mor.

I liked that we stuck with much of the original cast from book one though I don't think we got much personality or development from any of them. Somehow Bram was the most interesting, complex character in the book. He's cold and does some genuinely horrifying things, but there are moments where his desire to understand humanity and emotions peeks through, and I found myself empathizing with him. Ivy, on the other hand, felt pretty flat. She experiences horrible things in both books, but we never really see her grapple with any of it. One theme that keeps coming up is her feeling like she lives in Lydia's shadow, and it never gets addressed. That's a real missed opportunity, especially since Ivy leads the charge against Bram in a lot of ways and her confidence in herself really should have grown. The rest of the characters felt like they were there just to move the plot forward, which is fine, but I think that's why the characters feel so underdeveloped overall.

One thing I noticed really early on is that the book never stopped moving. It was nice not to feel like I was waiting for the story to get going, but as I got deeper into the book, I had a hard time telling if I liked the fast pacing or not. The good news is that we weren't hanging in suspense for very long when conflict came up, especially between Ivy and Emmett. As someone who hates prolonged tension and miscommunication between love interests, that was a win. The downside is that we never really get to see the characters work through problems because as soon as something came up, it'd be solved within a few pages and we'd move onto the next thing. It was hard to grasp the stakes and react to conflict when situations were being de-escalated so quickly.

Lastly, the plot felt all over the place. There's a small quest and a coup throughout the book, but also games similar to what we saw in book one, and the two don't mesh well together. There's no real reason for the trials, so they felt more like a distraction than a meaningful part of the plot. I think the book would have been stronger if it just focused on the group of characters on their quest to overthrow Bram.

All that said, I think fans of The Rose Bargain will find this one worth reading because it answers a lot of the questions book one left open. I just wish the pacing and plot had been tightened up, and that we'd gotten more room to see the characters actually grow.

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the early copy of this book!