it was definitely a conscious choice to continue this book because it starts off. a bit slow, but it did pick up and was fun from there.

i always love a bit of folklore and the south american stuff was really interesting, but i was not prepared for just how blatant and extreme the racism was between these fictional species? it caught me quite off guard, even with an understanding of south/central american history

my other problem was that the main characters were just like. stupid? like it was fun while reading but then you think about it afterwards and it’s like what???

how did reina not realise that feared evil grandmother was going to kill the damas.. like ‘oh no it’s just some drops of blood’ when has an evil god ever only wanted drops and not death. also eva? like seriously how did you think it was going to end well when you run away with a guy you only met over discord letters 

also whatever was going on with reina, celeste and maior was Weird!!

like we spent the entire book seeing reina pining over celeste, and celeste not rejecting any of those ideas and then admittedly out of the blue finding out that you’re cousins AND YOU STILL WANT TO BE WITH HER???? like surely that would be an instant turn off especially when she’d already said that she only did all this stuff as a friend?? then maior, who reina had been a bit of a cunt to (maior had also acted pretty racist towards reina so some of it’s justified) but who had only ever wanted to help her and be nice to her? and reina only going to her after she knows that she can’t have celeste? yikes.

all of this happened in like the last 10% of the book as well so don’t go in expecting a good sapphic storyline. 

however, i really liked the ending where eva became

rahmagut

and im assuming reina became

ches

and it might well be enough for me to read the sequel