Ugh this book made me so mad. I had said at one point out loud that if a certain thing happened I would give the book two stars, so I'm being true to my word. Clearly a lot of people enjoyed this type of story and I'm happy for them, but this was not for me. I should have DNF'd at the start when I first wanted to. 

I found all of the POV characters exhausting and tedious for different reasons. The humor did not work for me, but I will admit there was one single line that did make me laugh (

"Facial hair is not a motive, my lady."

) A lot of the messaging (which is rarely, if ever, subtle) has a lack of nuance and covers the same criticisms of fantasy that we have been hearing since at least the 2010s and that doesn't really apply to the majority of fantasy stories coming out today. The world outside of the POV characters feels kind of vague and amorphous. There are some non-POV characters that felt like they would be a lot more interesting to follow and had their own arguably more compelling stories happening off screen. The plotline with The Cobra and The Last Hope goes in a good direction, but it took way too long to get there and I was too mad about other plot developments to enjoy it. There was so much that I just didn't care about and that didn't feel earned.

Moira Quirk is a fabulous narrator and this type of darkly humorous tone (Like The Locked Tomb series) is in her wheelhouse, but I did have to get used to her attempts at an Oklahoman accent. Speaking of, for the main character being from Oklahoma there are some glaring mistakes like saying "I was in hospital," referring to afternoon tea as if that's a normal thing Americans do, and calling glasses "spectacles." 

Maybe I'm an anomaly but I really liked Key and he was the main thing keeping me reading. I wish he had been in the hands of an author who didn't need to use him to advance the agenda of the plot. What happened to his character was just everything I didn't want. I knew he was probably going to be killed to make the main character realize other people in the book were "real" because she connected with him more than any other character, and I suspected he was going to come back wrong and all those earlier hints at his magical lineage would slap the main character in the face. The writing beats you over the head with the (wow, so groundbreaking) ideas that slut-shaming is bad and having big boobs doesn't make you evil, but doesn't extend that courtesy to people with sociopathy. Maybe that was too much for me to ask for, or maybe the sequel will prove me wrong and try to make him less blandly evil and return to the potential I saw in his earlier portrayal, but I don't care enough about anything else to find out.