Let me preface by saying how much I love Holly's writing. Her darker themes and lush writing style have kept me hooked for many years now.
This is her first foray into the adult category and really I feel it's only for the few slightly more risqué sex scenes and the murder scenes than anything.
It doesn't read too complicated, there isn't much to learn or take from it.

I didn't overall enjoy this one much. I still really loved the writing itself and a few of the characters I did connect to. However, Black's romp into the urban fantasy genre isn't her strongest and maybe that falls on my enjoyment levels because I've never really been a fan of urban fantasy per se.

I still think her fans are going to like this if they enjoy her writing but the ones who love the characters and world of her previous books might find it a bit dry but still give it a chance!

4.5, really. What really worked for me is that Charlie is basically a superhero with zero powers, she sort of has negative powers, if you think about it...So juxtaposing her vulnerability with a somewhat dense and not entirely accessible magical system gets you on her side because it feels like you're trying to figure it all out together.

Thank you to Tor Books and NetGalley for an e-arc of this book!

I really enjoyed the rich magical system in this world and how dark it is. There are no potions or wand flicking here — just feeding shadows blood and split consciousness. I really enjoyed Charlie (a plus-sized, bad ass protagonist) and all of her flaws.

The reason I am giving this 4.5 stars was that it did drag at parts and some of the chapters were VERY long, but that’s just my personal preference. I immensely enjoyed this book and Holly Black does not disappoint, as usual!

Really good! Original idea, well-developed magical concepts, and realistic characters and situations. I want to shelve it with teens, but the characters are probably early or mid twenties. But there's probably not a wide readership among our older adult fiction readers. So that's my only hesitation--the book itself is amazing.

Holly Black is an absolute queen. This book had it all: dark magic, a tragic heroine, and other nefarious things. I need another Charlie Hall book ASAP.

I went into this book in a sort of "cautiously optimistic" fashion, mostly because I've not enjoyed some of very popular YA authors' forays into the adult world (like, I didn't like Crescent City or Ninth House). But y'all, Holly Black broke that streak for me. This was so much fun. I'm not going to try to summarize it, as the good folks at Tor wrote a perfectly fine description, and the worldbuilding is somewhat complex. The main character is on the edges of shadow magic, the magical system in this book, so she knows little about it as well and so the readers don't learn a ton about it. That's something I think will get fleshed out big time in the next book. But because there's some worldbuilding and set-up to do, the first quarter of the book or so was pretty slow for me. Once I got into it, though, I was hooked.

Cool worldbuilding aside, the main character is pretty delightful. She experienced non-sexual abuse from basically all the adults in her life, and now she's making her way as a low-key reformed con-artist/bartender. She's definitely a hot mess and makes some terrible decisions, but they all make sense for her character. And despite her terrible decisions, she's smart and spicy and tries to do the right thing. And then she takes a job that enmeshes her with a lot of the deeply evil power-players in town and things start to happen and go south pretty quickly. In true Holly Black fashion, there were a few twists I wasn't expecting. And then...there's a cliffhanger that I absolutely hated because I've read/seen that exact trope play out a bunch of times, and I think it's a pretty uninspired way to introduce tension in the romance (which I otherwise liked). But the rest of it was awesome, and despite the verrrrrry weak ending, I'm in for the sequel. 4.5 stars.

This is an amazing page turner, will make a grate movie, the cinematography would win awards. A bit of an adult Peter Pan world.

Holly Black has done it again folks!! Another fantastic world built with immersive magic in every page, mind-blowing plot twists, and immersive characters. From the first bit of the book, you will have already fallen completely in love with the world Holly Black has constructed and be left wanting more!

This was great! It had an interesting shadow-based magic system, a kick-ass main character, and plenty of grit to go around. The various surprises and twists of the book all felt earned, yet surprising (at least to some degree). Overall, I definitely recommend this to both fans of Holly Black specifically and urban fantasy in general.