Warning: The review that follows, and the source material it's based on, contains potentially triggering material, including mentions of slavery and of physical and sexual abuse.
This one was hit-or-miss with me. It's more popcorn than I'd normally read, but I picked it up because the worldbuilding seemed unique and because I'm a complete sucker for stories of characters escaping abusive situations. The story itself had its good points and its bad points, one of the most frustrating ones being that while I understood what the author was trying to do, the narrative was telling a lot more than it was showing, so I wasn't nearly as emotionally invested in the story as I could have been.
The Obligatory Romance: Feel free to roll your eyes at my tendency to harp on this. I could have told you before I even cracked the cover which two characters were going to end up as love interests, and while the book avoided a lot (though not all) of the common pitfalls of paranormal romance, it didn't really sell me on the ship either, and some of those aforementioned wait-this-is-controlling-and-intimidating-behavior-I'm-really-not-comfortable-with-this pitfalls were still there. I got the feeling that the author was at least aware that it needed to be addressed, but the attempts at doing so often came off as clumsy.
The Worldbuilding: No complaints here. I genuinely enjoyed the premise of an alternate history where humans have an uneasy coexistence with powerful creatures from myth and legend. I want to see more of where this goes.
The Characters: I had no complaints about the heroine as a character, though I had mixed feelings about her (eventual) love interest and about the villainess, who seemed to be there as part of a virgin/whore dynamic that made me really uncomfortable.
Our Vampires/Werewolves/Whatevers Are Different: While I appreciated the effort to portray the Others as a completely alien race that thought of humans as little more than intelligent meat, I felt that it was another case of telling and not showing - for a race that supposedly doesn't care about humans they'd sure made a lot of human friends near the end of the book. In keeping with the hit-or-miss pattern of this book, some of Meg's ability to ingratiate herself with them fit organically into the story while some of it felt really clunky and hand-wavy.
In short, it had some good points, and I enjoyed it enough to consider picking up the next book in the series, but it's not going onto my favorites list.
