Charlotte Kersten

My reviews for this series just keep getting shorter and shorter. Some brief thoughts:

-This is definitely the book where Kennedy is trying the hardest to incorporate elements of introspection, healing and growth. Props for that, for sure! Unfortunately, she’s taken a page from the Sarah J. Maas Book of Trauma Recovery because most of Auren’s journey here is taken up with having sex and learning how to fight. The other big component of her journey is deciding that she “doesn’t want to be weak anymore.” I touched on this a little with the last book, but it’s simultaneously very boring, harmful and lacking in any kind of accurate psychological insight to equate suffering through abuse and having PTSD with being weak.

-Slade continues to be written very appropriately as a love interest for a trafficking and abuse survivor, kissing her after she says no to it, seducing her instead of talking to her about the important political things that are happening that have a serious impact on her, making huge decisions about her life without discussing them her and going down on her while she’s asleep. Do different people have different boundaries regarding “sleep sex”? Yes…but should a book allegedly about trauma recovery and healthy new relationships make it clear that those kinds of boundaries need to be clearly discussed before someone just randomly decides to initiate sex with their sleeping partner? Apparently not!

-The big plot point in this book is that Auren goes on trial for the crimes of stealing Midas’s power, killing him and massacring that entire room of innocent people with her gold in the last book. To be fair, there are elements of misogyny and victim-blaming in the “Auren stole Midas’s powers” element of the trial that I liked. But the book frames the entire idea of Auren facing repercussions for *anything* she (actually) did as some kind of horrible miscarriage of justice. I mean…she did murder an entire room of people! Just saying!