Synopsis:

On the night Rune’s life changed forever, blood ran in the streets. Now, in the aftermath of a devastating revolution, witches have been diminished from powerful rulers to outcasts ruthlessly hunted due to their waning magic, and Rune must hide what she is.

Spending her days pretending to be nothing more than a vapid young socialite, Rune spends her nights as the Crimson Moth, a witch vigilante who rescues her kind from being purged. When a rescue goes wrong, she decides to throw the witch hunters off her scent and gain the intel she desperately needs by courting the handsome Gideon Sharpe – a notorious and unforgiving witch hunter loyal to the revolution – who she can’t help but find herself falling for.

Gideon loathes the decadence and superficiality Rune represents, but when he learns the Crimson Moth has been using Rune’s merchant ships to smuggle renegade witches out of the republic, he inserts himself into her social circles by pretending to court her right back. He soon realizes that beneath her beauty and shallow façade, is someone fiercely intelligent and tender who feels like his perfect match. Except, what if she’s the very villain he’s been hunting?

Rating:

Rating:

This book was another recommendation by friends and luckily this one was much more successful than the first. I really loved this book. Rune was a fascinating character. She felt like a real person. She tried to make the right decisions and she was trying to do the right things, but she didn’t always succeed. It was really refreshing to read a young adult female heroine who isn’t absolutely amazing and perfect at literally everything. That’s a very annoying trope in the young adult space and I am ready for it to stop. But Rune was different and I appreciated that.

The magic system in this book was fantastic. I loved the idea of magic having a price. You may be a witch and be able to wield magic, but you have to pay for it with blood and scars. And the more complex the spell is, the higher the price. Some spells are outlawed because they required the unwilling sacrifice of someone else’s blood.

We learn early on in the book that this world used to be ruled by three witch queens, sisters. They were evil and abused the non-magic citizens horribly and used their magic to make the general public their slaves in every sense of the word. So, they overthrew the witch queens. Killed them. And outlawed witchcraft. Then we institute the Bloodguard. Their job is to hunt down witches and then execute them.

One thing that didn’t make a lot of sense to me was Rune’s insistence on saving all witches. She knows that some witches are evil and corrupted by their power. But she insists on saving all captured witches as the witch version of Robin Hood. She doesn’t even know these women but is convinced that she should save all of their lives. Why> How does she know that these women are innocent? Most of them likely are but not all. But this book doesn’t really delve into that moral gray area, which disappointed me. I hope that might be a bigger theme in the second book.

The big reveal at the end was also a bit predictable. I knew it was coming a long way off. The payoff of the reveal was still really good though. Overall this was a great book and I immediately jumped into book two.