

This won’t hurt” and then straight up snapping the villain’s neck was the most bad bitch move I’ve ever witnessed and I loved it Also, Kovit saying “I never inflict pain I don’t know. It’s about the power moves: There’s this one scene where Henry catches Nita and villain monologues to her about how he cleverly figured it out, and she’s like “you just figured it out because Fabricio told you, right?” I loved that. Narratively coherent villains: The fact that the villain of the story is essentially motivated by a desire to control so-called unnaturals by manipulating them is just so… thematically on point. I like that he’s tested on the bad parts of this but also that the narrative humanizes this on such a fundamental level. It’s established in book one that he will torture anyone but he also won’t hurt kids and won’t hurt friends of his. Kovit’s moral code: I’m SO passionate about the way Kovit’s character is written.

I’ve already gone over some of my favorite parts of this book in my review of book one, so let me just get on into a good long spoiler section.

Possibly the only thing I don’t like about this is that occasionally, the author needs to establish world or character further, and tends to do that in a somewhat infodumpy way that I don’t love. ➽ Diana, a ghoul with morals and an excellent hacker every second he’s on the page is a fucking delight he keeps telling everyone he’s going to murder them in the basement. ➽ Marielle, a half-dolphin side character Something I absolutely adore about this story is the wide and interesting cast of side characters. Schaeffer quickly gets you to root for people who are, on an objective level, awful neither Nita nor any other character are particularly good, but almost all of the characters are strangely likable. occasionally kind of brutal? But it is so engaging. This series is so interesting and new and revels so hard in being over the top and. Nita really found out the world would try to kill her for money and decided the best solution was to become so scary no one would try… icon
