Such a pleasant surprise!

This was such a pleasant surprise! I picked this book up on a whim (and partially because the completionist part of me wanted to read this so that I would, yet again, be caught up to Marissa Meyer's oeuvre, since this duology is the only one of her works, up to 2024 at least, that I haven't read yet), but I am very pleasantly surprised! This ended up being, easily, my favorite Marissa Meyer book!

I enjoyed the protagonist, I enjoyed the romance, I enjoyed all the mysteries that are presented, I enjoyed more diverse representation that we have in this work. I also think that the author upped her game where atmospheric writing is concerned, especially in the beginning of the book. And I think that atmospheric writing really suits a Rumpelstiltskin retelling such as this.

I really enjoyed that our protagonist is not a fighter, but instead has to use her wits and her silver tongue to get herself out of trouble. That same tongue also gets her into trouble, and boy are there consequences for her actions. Serious consequences.
Such serious consequences that I needed to go to Goodreads and doublecheck whether this really is classified as a YA story.
Therefore my complaint is that this book needs a trigger warning for death of children. It has on page, quite gruesome and detailed description of corpses of, like, 7-year old kids.
But other than the feeling that this needs to have a trigger warning, I really enjoyed this book. I have devoured it in about a week. I also really enjoyed that, while our protagonist had some rash moments, she actually did make quite a few actually intelligent decisions which I was delighted to see.

Rebecca Soler narrates almost all of Marissa Meyer's book and while she's always good, she doesn't always feel to me like she suits the characters (I had that problem in Heartless - I think the protagonist there is much softer than Soler's tone for her). However, I don't think that's a problem here, as I think Soler's tone fits Serilda really well.
My only problem is that, the pace of the audiobook was too fast for me and I needed to slow down the speed. This has never happened before with Soler's work for me, but it's not too big of a deal.

All in all, I am super glad I picked this up on a whim (and in autumn, no less!) and I am immediately picking up the second book in this duology! Can't wait to see how Serilda manages to talk her way out of all of the troubles she managed to talk herself into.

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