Five stars. I re-read the middle and wish it was a little easier to read, but the end was creative and surprising. I hope this is not the only book because I want to see more of the peasant girl and demon together. I like their dynamic and need to see what happens next.

Thank you Netgalley for the free ARC of the book. The story was interesting enough to keep me hooked and the writing has a lot of potential. The author is good with building atmosphere. The idea of the demon extorting a poor village girl and she has to figure it all out on her own was intense.
There was potential with the point of views but they got a little confusing and I didn’t care about the other characters much. Still, they were short and the author spent more time on Catalina as a whole, which i preferred. If the book was from Catalina’s point of view the entire time, I would give this five stars. I just feel like it lost some suspense because we saw some of what the demon was up to.

This was a weird read. DNF. The perspectives and povs were a mess and seemed to not have been edited or worked on enough.

Avernal is a weird little book. My feelings on it are very conflicted.

I liked the ideas presented here, there are in fact some genuinely interesting concepts. The story gets bogged down by just okay writing and some jarring POV choices that I'm not sure why they're here. There's too many POVs and sometimes we get the same scene just told through a different perspective. It was hard to form an attachment to any of the characters that are the main players (the demon, the girl, the hunter). Most of the book is the town trying to investigate the demon while Catalina is meeting him in secret--so imagine how repetitive the multiple POVs got.

[Thank you to Net Galley for the advance copy of this book.] There are so many good ideas that run through the veins of this little book: demon encounters during the Spanish Inquisition, demon hunters casting holy magic, a complex and evolving relationship between a Catholic girl and an actual demon! It even delves a little into the politics of Hell. While I was expecting and hoping for maybe more horror from this story, these interesting concepts and more make for a fun dark fantasy told from multiple perspectives, with some horror elements really emerging in the final third of the book.

My main gripe is that, mostly in the first half of the book, there are moments when the author narrates the same scene from multiple perspectives or tells a particular series of events out of order, and while sometimes it works to reveal something or push a particular narrative forward, there are times when it feels a little confusing. I also wish there was more resolution for some of the core characters at the end. All in all, 4/5 for me!

The book starts with multiple pows' short sketching of the events. They don't show the whole story just some cut parts from different places and time, which leads to zero understanding of the situation. I didn't connect with the characters, wasn't really interested in finding out where that fragmentary narration leads them.

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Thanks to NetGalley and Victory Editing NetGalley Co-op for providing me with this free eARC in exchange for my honest review!

DNF at 25%.

I thought it was an intriguing premise, and I do think the rest of the plot will be exciting - I liked the idea of the demon - but I felt that the multiple POVs were too many and shifted around too frequently in the early chapters to keep my attention. I think it might have been more immersive to be left longer in Catalina's POV at the start, to set more of the scene, to become invested in her and fully feel the tension of what has happened to her.

Some good descriptive writing in there, although there were a few misspelled words.