Friends, my disappointment is great. Although I read this book as a book club pick, it had been on my TBR since it came out, so I was excited to get a chance to read it. Between the stunning cover -- possibly the most beautiful book cover I have ever seen -- and the blurb promising a dark and woodsy sapphic fantasy, I was pretty hyped. Now I am sad to report that I liked almost nothing about this book.

For the positives, I will say that Martinez can write solid prose, aside from the occasional overwrought passage or nonsensical metaphor. I also really enjoyed the descriptions of the forest, which set up a great spooky atmosphere. Unfortunately, we did not spend nearly as much time as I expected in the forest. I also appreciated having a masc love interest, which seems extra rare in fantasy compared to other sapphic genres. Nimrah was a decent character, if a total doormat for Malka.

And on that note, Malka is genuinely the worst main character I have read in a very long time. She is deeply unlikeable, and not intentionally so. She comes across as ignorant and prejudiced for the first 80% of the book. When she receives new information that should challenge her beliefs, she usually doesn't react at all and it has no effect on her behavior. She treats Nimrah very poorly and never apologizes. Any time something bad happens to people she cares about, she manages to make it all about her. She verges on too stupid to live at times and has eyeroll-inducing plot armor. Her motivations are inconsistent and opaque, and we are clunkily told most of her character development in laborious narrative monologues rather than actually seeing/feeling it. It is impossible to believe that she is actually 23 because of how immature she is. Malka and most of the other major characters rarely face real consequences for their actions, which is extra obvious given that less important characters routinely experience dire consequences -- including torture and death -- for equal, if not less significant, actions. Martinez also refuses to let any of these plot-armored major characters be genuinely morally gray. At worst, they are semi-responsible for bad things happening by being bystanders. They are never the voluntary actors in causing harm. Basically none of them die. The result is overly simplistic, juvenile, and uninteresting character arcs and themes. This really doesn't fit in a book containing graphic antisemitic violence and scenes of gore and torture that could be at home in a grimdark fantasy.

Another major issue I had was with the magic system. I'm totally fine with the concept of magic that doesn't always work depending on a mix of factors, but it seemed like the magic did or didn't work just depending on whatever would be most convenient for the plot. There was zero consistency. The magic would fail in a particular situation, and everyone would just shrug and have no answer as to why. And then in another very similar situation, it would work just fine, again with no explanation. Not only was this infuriating for worldbuilding reasons, but it also exposed the absolute triviality of most of the plot. The whole story arc was just clunky, contrived, and a waste of potentially interesting themes and concepts.

Related to worldbuilding, I had no idea if this was supposed to be a queernorm world or not. The god of the Yahadi is referred to by everyone with they/them pronouns, and Malka's friends and family seem totally accepting of her and Nimrah's relationship at the end, but it really seems like Malka starts out struggling to understand her sexuality in a way that doesn't make a lot of sense for a queernorm world.

The audiobook narrator was solid, even if it did sometimes feel like she was trying to put me to sleep.