I read this as a tween and again as a young teen and thought it was weird and wonderful. Vampires on the moon!

This is an absolutely fantastic fantasy that I first read when I was 12 years old, but I still love it. It's written for young adults, but it definitely has an adult sensibility that makes it an appealing fairy tale for an older reader. Pierce creates a completely unique, imaginative and vivid landscape and draws you in from the first page.

Very old-fashioned language, and the chance to un-make a vampire. Also, the vampires can fly, and they eat souls.

I had little idea of what this book was about when I first picked it up - I'm just weak for angel-centric stories so the cover/title piqued my interest.

What I found inside was a fairytale-ish retelling of Beauty & the Beast. We follow our heroine, Aeriel, a slave who attempts to save her mistress after she was captured by the darkangel. In the story we learn that he is one of 7 icari brothers, and once he has claimed 14 wives he will come into his true powers.

Aeriel becomes his servant, weaving emotions into gowns for his wives. As she toils away, she comes to find that the darkangel isn't all that he appears to be...

I'm not gonna lie, I don't really like reading fairytales so I found the overall story quite dull. The pacing tended to lag between Big Plot Events and I found the character development stagnant, especially with the darkangel who we were supposed to sympathize with. There were elements of the story I did enjoy (Aeriel's time in the desert, a lot of interesting worldbuilding tidbits came up there) but in the end, I was just bored.


2.5 stars rounded down.

Told like a fairytale and mostly done well. The writing was pacy and compelling but the protagonist seemed less "good and patient and loving" as a classic fairytale heroine and more just "dumb as a brick", which made the message which I guess was meant to be "love and kindness conquering all" feel rather stumbled-into and unearned. Ans then at the end, everything became far too cloying and it started to feel less actually fairytale-like and more like a bad pastiche of fairytale instead.

The language was too hard for me to understand and it left me very underwhelmed. I feel like the description was misleading. Won’t be finishing the series.

This book itself was fine, but the trilogy ends up being awful. Nothing in the world-building makes sense. All the old gods turn out to be

Spoiler

ancient aliens, which is one the stupidest plots in the history of humanity and the main couple have to never be together for REASONS.

I read this two decades ago and I'm still mad about the entire thing.