u/BeautifulTree5585

I’m still reeling from the semis and the finale. Literal goosebumps watching it because I’m so incredibly happy the right person won. Emanuele Bruno is the absolute definition of a champion.

The odds were stacked against him. Homie went from getting dropped by his own captain early on, teetering on the brink of elimination, and just refused to roll over and die. He dragged himself through every single challenge, throwing his entire soul into the circuit. You could see the pure shock on his face when he survived the cut and made the semi-finals because he didn't even expect it himself. This is EXACTLY why you should never give up.

His physical engine is insane, but his mind is what carried him across the finish line. He showed us that if you can swallow the pain and just keep your legs moving, you outlast everyone. Bruno just kept reaching deeper and deeper into his reserves, refusing to accept defeat against himself. The man has essentially mastered the discipline of completely shutting out what his body is screaming at him and powering through on a purely steely mindset. Every single time I thought, "aight, ain't no way this guy can keep going," he somehow found a way to do just that. It was quite satisfying to watch because even as a viewer, I couldn't gauge when his tank would go completely empty. You know when you can sometimes just tell where it might be heading, I kid you not he had me on the edge of my seat the entire time.

It felt like a beautiful, messy spin on the Bradbury Principle. He didn't just stand around watching a pile-up, he was bone-tired, fighting through the burnout of those horrible obstacle races and that brutal pull-up challenge. With little to no rest at that (and bleeding hands!!) That death match reset rule was disgusting, but Bruno really surprised me there esp against someone who chose strategy and still lost lol. I felt llike this season also just showed that it's ultimately a challenge against yourself. You really gotta have the discipline.

Also, watching a judoka who literally showed up on day one with his mom take the entire crown for them both is just peak storytelling. Easily the best finale we've ever had.

Disclaimer: No, I didn't use AI. This is how I write. I love writing long, thoughtful thinkpieces that no one asked for. If you aren't into that, then this isn't the one for you x.

Also another note: Not a Ciara-sympathiser, or here to beg you all to like her. Just thought it’d be fun to psychoanalyse her a bit and use her storyline as a way into some wider social commentary about the experiment. Obviously there’s speculation involved. I could be giving her too much credit, reading too much into things, or generalising from the very edited 10-ep version of these people we got. I’m just having fun with the material we were given. And again, if you do not enjoy long pieces, THEN THIS ISN'T FOR YOU. Kindly keep your nasty comments to yourself.

· · · ──── ·✶· ──── · · ·

Ciara might be my favourite example of women entering male-dominated fields because I have rarely seen a woman approach dating with this much audacity, strategy and shameless commitment to getting exactly what she wants.

A lot of people seem to have taken Ciara completely at face value: gold digger. Spoilt. Entitled. Looking for a servant. Case closed.

Meanwhile, from very early on I was thinking: this woman has come here with a plan. And the more we saw of her, the harder that feeling was to shake.

£300 first dates. Expensive taste, provider expectations (i.e. rich husband). Princess treatment. Ajay fetching the drinks, giving the massages. Ciara wasn’t coy about any of it either. She seemed determined to make the message impossible to miss: this is the standard attached to dating me, proceed accordingly. She took the whole luxury-girlie persona and leaned into it so aggressively that it started feeling deliberate.

Meeting her friends added to that impression. They seemed a lot more chilled and ordinary than the very polished, almost aristocratic London-luxury image Ciara had been giving us up to that point. That doesn’t tell me anything definitive about her money, upbringing or what her life actually looks like, obviously. People are not carbon copies of their friends. But the contrast did make me wonder how much of Princess Ciara was just her natural personality, and how much she was consciously turning up for the experiment.

And I don’t mean “performance” as an accusation. I think that was the strategy.

Someone on this sub described her as what happens when unhinged TikTok dating discourse escapes containment and enters real life, which is an accurate read.

But babe, that’s only half the tea.

We’ve all seen the content: know your worth, never settle, make him invest, a provider will provide, don’t over-give, let the man pursue, set expectations early, blah blah. Watch enough of this shit, and your algorithm will eventually convince you that a £42 pasta dinner means a man fundamentally hates you.

Ciara clearly knew the syllabus, and actually came to put it into play.

She seemed to understand something many contestants didn’t: the pods weren’t just an opportunity to find out whether someone liked you. They were also a chance to establish your expectations and what being with you would entail before either person became too attached to renegotiate.

And before anyone gets their pants in a twist: yes, you’re allowed to have expectations. Everybody has a checklist, whether that’s personality, looks, ambition, lifestyle, religion, money or whatever else matters to them. I’m not interested in debating whether Ciara’s standards are noble enough for public approval. They’re hers, and that’s not the point.

What stood out to me was how deliberately she established them. She wanted a provider. She liked luxury. She considered herself high-maintenance and never presented that as some embarrassing flaw Ajay would have to graciously overlook.

Ajay heard all of it.
Ajay continued pursuing her.
Ajay proposed.

That man read the terms and conditions and clicked Agree, so I’m not entertaining the “poor unsuspecting Ajay” narrative.

Then they reach the retreat, and Ciara starts turning the dial. Bring me this. Get me that. Massage please. She openly admits in confessionals she was pushing him to see how far she could go. Basically, she started QA testing the man.

Level 8 survived. Let’s try level 9. Still operational?

And I- oop. Eventually, our scientist discovered the consequences of exceeding the recommended testing parameters.

Their argument around Ajay’s parents was where she seriously overplayed her hand for me. He was basically dealing with his family choosing not to participate. How Ciara managed to make it about her is a big LOL. No wonder he was like fk this, I'm out. The aftermath, though, is one reason I struggle with this idea that Ciara is uniquely awful.

She apologised. And no, not one of those “I’m sorry you felt that way." She actually acknowledged that she had gone too far, articulated it well (except for the self-sabotage excuse, which I'm personally not entirely buying) and gave Ajay room to speak. Then everything else he’d been swallowing came out too, including the financial pressure of keeping up with the lavish lifestyle he had promised her.

This was basically the first time Ajay got to renegotiate the contract. And Ciara let him.

The reunion made that storyline make even more sense. >!She admitted things felt suspiciously good once they moved in together, so she started poking at them. She called it self-sabotage and acknowledged projecting baggage from previous relationships onto the wrong person.!<

>!Now, I’m not sure how much of that I completely believe, especially with the tear-work performance. This girl can act, so sometimes I’m watching her like, alright babe 👀!<

But the explanation tracks. She seems to have come from relationships where she gave too much of herself, and now decided the next man to walk into her life would have to prove himself first. She took the philosophy way too far, to the point where it started working against her. Once Ajay made her feel safe, some of that ice-queen act finally started melting.

And that word came directly from her at the reunion: safe. Ajay makes her feel safe. That explains the ice-queen act for me.

Now to address the inconvenient fact hanging over all the predictions that she would scare Ajay away, exhaust him, bankrupt him, emasculate him and have him sprinting towards the nearest emergency exit:

Did she get the man? Yes. Yes, she did.>!And a year later, she still has him sitting beside her.!<

Ajay was also one of the most obviously smitten men of the season. While some lads needed what felt like 3 business days and a full consultation with the boys before arriving at “I think I love her,” Ajay just blurted it out during the retreat. His mouth seemingly received the information before his brain could apply a filter.

Whatever else you think about their dynamic, I never questioned whether that man wanted Ciara. So unfortunately for the prosecution, the pink-pill laboratory did produce some results.

I’m obviously not saying everybody should demand £300 dinners and psychologically stress-test potentials until one survives. Please keep half of Ciara’s methodology behind reinforced laboratory glass, thank you very much.

But what matters beneath all the theatrics is that she demonstrated something genuinely important: people take cues from how you present yourself.

Ciara walked in convinced she was the prize, and Ajay treated her accordingly.

And this season gave us some interesting contrasts, because a surprising number of contestants entered the experiment practically handing their potential partner an annotated guide to every insecurity they possessed.

Francesca hears Joseph say he enjoys working out and would like to share that with his wife, and suddenly she’s explaining that previous partners body-shamed her, that her weight fluctuates and checking whether future weight gain would become an issue.

We have somehow travelled from “my husband likes the gym” to submitting your future body for pre-approval.

Yasmin had a similar dynamic with her vitiligo. There’s nothing wrong with telling someone what shaped your confidence, but if you introduce it as this enormous insecurity you fear rejection over, you’ve effectively told them: this is the part of me that lowers my value.

And we saw versions of this everywhere: being cheated on, badly treated before, trust issues, worrying you’re too much, not enough, difficult to love.

I’m not advocating marrying somebody while keeping your emotional history classified by MI5. Vulnerability is part of intimacy. But there’s a difference between vulnerability developing once somebody has earned access to you and handing a near-stranger the instruction manual to your soft spots during the audition phase.

Especially when the disclosures come packaged with instructions: I’ve been cheated on, so please don’t betray me. I’ve been body-shamed, so please still find me attractive if my weight changes. This is my biggest insecurity, so please reassure me you can handle it.

Why are we leading with all the ways someone could potentially hurt you?

You don’t need to teach a decent person not to weaponise your insecurities. If they love and respect you, that should show through their behaviour. And if they aren’t that kind of person, congrats, you’ve handed them a map with every pressure point circled in red.

That’s what makes Ciara such a contrast. She obviously had baggage too. This is abundantly clear now. She had been hurt before, had over-invested in previous relationships and was clearly terrified of repeating that pattern. But she didn’t enter the relationship presenting that baggage as a list of reasons Ajay might find her difficult to love. She built the dynamic around what she expected from him and let the softer parts emerge later.

Her attitude was basically: I come in this package. This is what I expect. Are you prepared?

Was she unreasonable at times? Very.

But compare that with: Here are all the things about me that might make me less desirable. Are you still willing to choose me?

Ciara would rather eat her Pilates socks.

Then you look at the men and realise they were doing their own version of expectation-setting too, except in the opposite direction, which is the version we’re far more accustomed to seeing.

Taylor warning Sophie that he was going to mess up and disappoint her, followed by them literally clinking glasses to “messing up,” had me staring at my screen in disbelief. Why are we cheersing the warranty disclaimer? Girl, stand up.

The whole “you’re too good for me” genre makes me roll my eyes too.
“You see the good in me.” “You’re so forgiving.” “You accept me for who I am.”
How lovely. How convenient. Notice how her greatest qualities somehow revolve around making your life easier?

There’s something slick about warning somebody in advance that you’ll disappoint them. You package shortcomings as vulnerability while quietly lowering the standard they’re expected to hold you to later. If I already told you I mess up, I’m difficult, not easily expressive, you’re too good for me... well, you knew what you were signing up for, didn’t you?

And that's why they always have that excuse ready when they inevitably mess up. Ryan tried a version of this at the reunion with >!“I find it hard to be vulnerable,” and Cuba shut it down immediately. Basically: no, don’t do that. Don’t turn this into some abstract vulnerability issue when we already had an off-camera conversation about how we would handle things if either of us got cold feet.!<

>!I loved that she refused to let him replace the actual agreement between them with a softer explanation that made his behaviour sound inevitable. They had already agreed off-camera on how they would handle communication, and she wasn’t about to let him rewrite breaking that agreement as evidence that vulnerability was simply difficult for him. (I also think the hostess did a terrible job of grilling him there as well, so that's why I'm super glad she stepped in and defended herself.)!<

>!The real victim was her: he blindsided her on camera, then left her to sit there and process the whole thing in real time. Followed up by the whole mango line.!<

Like... wow.

Cuba does this consistently. She has a good bullshit radar and doesn’t abandon her own read just because someone gets uncomfortable. She clocked Ryan pulling away, Yasmin’s “location” issue with Jordan, and still >!wouldn’t let Ryan rewrite the story at the reunion!<.

That kind of emotional intelligence only works if you have the backbone to trust your own judgement. Cuba has both.

And that’s the connection I see with Ciara. Both women trust their own judgement, although they operate differently. Cuba lets the evidence accumulate before drawing the line. Ciara walks in with the line already drawn and evaluates Ajay against it.

That’s why Ciara feels like such a funny reversal of the usual script.

Some of the women were essentially saying: here are my insecurities, please still choose me.
Some of the men: here are my flaws, please lower your expectations accordingly.
Ciara: here are my expectations. Can you meet them?

But I still find it funny that her audacity became such a scandal when male contestants have been using their own versions of expectation management all season in forms we barely blink at.

Lower the bar. Warn her you’ll disappoint her. Praise how forgiving she is. Tell her she’s “too good for you” while continuing to give her reasons to prove it. (It’s the same dynamic I explored in my Jack thinkpiece.)

Ciara did the opposite. She raised the bar and waited to see who would still jump.

Women in male-dominated fields.

Which brings me to the reunion discourse around her and Ajay coming down hard on Jack. I saw people arguing that finally Jack apologised and took accountability, so they should have left him alone (Finally being the keyword here.)

An apology a year later doesn’t retroactively insert accountability where it was missing at the time. And I’m not using Jack’s ADHD as some universal solvent either. ADHD can explain overwhelm, needing space, impulsivity or struggling to communicate when overstimulated. That deserves empathy. It doesn’t account for dodgy behaviour like shape-shifting explanations, the location issue or redirecting the issue towards Faye’s past and inability to trust him.

And if anyone in that cast was never going to let somebody waffle around the original question, it was Ciara.

That scene with Jack tells you so much about her. She asks him something, watches him go red and start tying himself into verbal knots, and waits. No rescuing him from the silence. No softening the question. No helping him construct an explanation she can conveniently accept.

Just answer the question.

And, crucially, when the person in the wrong was Ciara, she proved she could tolerate that same standard being applied to herself. She can acknowledge when she messed up and take responsibility.

That’s probably why I came away from her storyline more positively than many viewers did. Confidence without self-awareness becomes arrogance quickly, and Ciara spent part of the season tap-dancing on that line. But she recognised when she crossed it, apologised and adjusted.

She came in with a strategy. She pushed it too far. (I also partly think that she may not have thought she'd actually get this far, that's why she started stumbling midway through) Ajay pushed back, she recalibrated, and somewhere in the middle they found something that genuinely seemed to work for them.

So I’m personally not leaving LiB thinking Ciara discovered the scientifically optimal way to date. But imo there is a lesson to be learned here. She understood one piece of dating psychology considerably better than several other people in that cast:

If you walk into a relationship believing that being chosen is the greatest honour somebody can bestow upon you, you can very quickly start negotiating against your own self-worth.

· · · ──── ·✶· ──── · · ·

Edit, since this apparently needs saying: I also wrote a long-ass thinkpiece about Jack before this. Curiously, nobody accused me of secretly being Jack, being “too invested” in him, or needing to put my thoughts in a diary. Apparently writing extensively about someone is perfectly normal when you’re criticising them, but writing extensively to positively portray someone you think has been misunderstood suddenly means you’re too invested or might secretly be them. Ok buddy

I write about contestants and dynamics I find interesting, and was doing that long before I hopped on this LiB sub. You’re allowed to think Ciara is bland. I’m allowed to find her interesting enough to analyse. We will all survive.

I keep seeing people focus on the obvious mystery of Jack’s little 5am excursion, and don’t get me wrong, I would also like the Metropolitan Police to open a file. Find My Friends mysteriously goes dark. Man disappears. Phone calls unanswered. Suspect is eventually located miles away after apparently embarking on a contemplative sunrise stroll through London. Detectives then discover the suspect is wearing sliders.

That last detail had me absolutely cackling. W Faye's mum

But honestly, the more interesting part isn’t even where he went. It’s what Jack does every single time somebody asks him to account for himself. His first explanation was basically that he had no idea why his location disappeared. Didn’t switch it off, must’ve happened somehow. Technology these days, eh? Then the questions keep coming, and suddenly we’re hearing that he deliberately wanted to “disconnect” and “go off-grid.”

Right. So which one is it? Because those explanations are doing slightly different jobs, hun.

And then comes the phone argument, which I think sums him up perfectly. Faye asks to see his phone because, understandably, the whole situation has made her suspicious. Everything already looks incredibly fishy, so conveniently, Jack becomes the spokesperson for digital privacy.

“Relationships need trust.”

Correct.

“Partners shouldn't invade each other's privacy.”

Also correct.

But why are we suddenly holding a TED Talk on the philosophy of trust, Jack? What happened approximately 3 hours ago?

That's the sleight of hand. This is what Jack does that irritates me so much. He takes a conversation about his specific behaviour and drags it into some grand abstract moral debate where he can conveniently occupy the reasonable position. Instead of discussing what he did, we're suddenly discussing Faye's reaction to what he did, and how unreasonable she's being.

Nobody randomly woke up that morning and requested a forensic audit of your phone, Jack. You created a situation that questioned if you can be trusted; from the disappearance to the shape-shifting and lack of accountability under questioning. Maybe deal with the glaringly obvious cause before lecturing everybody about the symptom?

And you can almost see the machinery start breaking whenever someone manages to pin him down and refuse to let him redirect the conversation.

Watch him with Ciara. He goes red, starts waffling, sentences stop connecting to the sentences that came before them, and suddenly this otherwise confident man looks like somebody has unplugged his brain mid-conversation. Ciara barely even has to do much. She asks the question, gives him that piercing stare and waits. No rescuing him from the silence, no helping him construct an explanation, no accepting the first vaguely plausible answer just to make the tension disappear. (I absolutely love the way Ciara handled this btw, literal goosebumps!)

And he squirms.

That scene also made the difference between Ciara and Faye painfully obvious to me.

I don’t think we can definitively say Jack chose Faye because she was easier for him to deal with, but I can certainly see why their dynamic suits him better. Faye notices red flags pretty well. That isn’t her problem. Her problem is that once she notices them, she starts negotiating with herself about whether they’re really red enough to matter.

Ciara says, essentially, “That doesn’t make sense. Explain yourself.”

Faye says, “That doesn’t make sense... but maybe I’m being unfair?”

And for a man like Jack, that difference is HUGE. One dynamic gives Jack considerably more room to manoeuvre than the other.

Because he doesn’t actually need Faye to believe every ridiculous explanation immediately. He just needs enough room to keep talking until she starts doubting her own reaction. We literally watched his bizarre 5am disappearance morph into a conversation about whether Faye has trust issues. Suddenly her past and insecurities are centre stage, and she’s proving she isn’t paranoid instead of Jack explaining why he behaved suspiciously in the first place.

Whether he does that consciously or not, the result is incredibly convenient for him: Faye starts interrogating herself instead of interrogating Jack.

And I think that’s precisely why Ciara rattled him so badly. You cannot pull the “maybe you just don’t trust me” routine on somebody who has zero interest in proving herself to you.

She just looks at you like: Okay, so answer the question.

And suddenly Jack has very little to say.

It doesn’t help that the whole “number one” situation became yet another confusing mess of who told whom what, followed by Ciara saying the women had started comparing notes because Jack seemed to be telling different women different things. And somehow, whenever these situations blow up around him, Jack always seems slightly baffled that anyone could possibly have interpreted his behaviour negatively.

Gee. I wonder why.

Ciara later described their pod dates as surface-level, and this honestly tracks. So much of what we saw from him revolved around chemistry, flirting, sex, romantic gestures and big declarations. Even after his and Faye’s first night together, the whole “Jesus Christ” / eyes-rolling-back performance to the boys felt less like a man talking respectfully about his future wife and more like a teenager submitting a five-star TripAdvisor review of her bedroom performance. Where is the class?

Then Faye’s parents start asking the deeply unsexy questions about work, relocation and finances, and everything becomes noticeably less concrete. “I’m going into sales.” Selling what? Silence. Faye calling him a “Jack of all trades” was accidentally the funniest summary of the situation possible.

And I think that’s ultimately my issue with him. Jack seems much better at the theatre of love than the responsibilities of it. He can write the letter, make the grand gesture, tell Faye how obsessed he is with her and make everything feel very romantic. But can he communicate properly when it matters? Can he make concrete plans? Can he acknowledge that trust doesn’t just materialise from nowhere, and that his own actions can damage it? Does he even know what accountability is?

The Jasad Heir by Sara Hashem — 3.5★

>"In the measure of monster or man, what tips the scales?"

This book frustrated me because there were so many moments where I could see the potential underneath it all.

The premise had me immediately: a hidden heir, a conquered kingdom, forbidden magic, political tension, deadly trials, and an enemies-to-lovers dynamic between a girl in hiding and the literal heir of the people hunting her kind down. On paper, this should have been a guaranteed hit for me.

A heroine who’d rather disappear than save the kingdom

But what actually surprised me most was Essiya herself.

>"The only war left was to survive."

I really liked that she didn’t start off wanting to reclaim her throne or save her people. She’s selfish, avoidant, traumatised, and honestly just wants to disappear into a quiet life where nobody knows who she is. That felt far more interesting to me than the usual “lost princess destined to rise again and be the ultimate hero” fantasy arc. Her entire character is rooted in survival and denial, and I think that aspect of the story genuinely worked.

Beautiful prose can still exhaust you

That said, my biggest issue with this book was the writing itself.

I usually love rich prose, and Sara Hashem absolutely has some beautifully written lines throughout the book. The issue is that the prose rarely lets up, and that's when it becomes purple prose. Almost every emotion is rendered in this heightened, dramatic register, to the point where the narration starts feeling less natural and more like every sentence is trying to sound profound or quote-worthy. Eventually, the writing becomes so determined to impress you with its intensity that it occasionally tips into awkwardness and over-written lines that draw attention to themselves rather than the scene itself.

The book moves from humour, to grief, to trauma, to political oppression in such quick succession that the prose starts to feel dense and almost breathless. Some lines are genuinely beautiful on their own, but because the writing constantly underlines every emotional beat and later reiterates those same dramatic one-liners in italics, the effect eventually became exhausting rather than immersive. Instead of trusting the emotion to land naturally, the prose kept circling back to emphasise the same ideas again and again, which ultimately dulled their impact for me.

There’s also a lot of repetition. The narrative constantly reminds you how terrifying and unreadable Arin is, how broken Essiya is, how monstrous Hanim was, how much everyone has suffered. At some point, I was just like… okay, I understand 😭

Arin especially suffered from this for me because the story kept describing him as this terrifying mastermind, but most of the time he just came across as emotionally repressed and strict. The prose often felt more invested in selling his mystique than his actual actions were. There’s even a moment where Essiya basically thinks he could conquer a thousand fortresses just because he’s meticulously mapping mountain terrain, and I remember sitting there thinking… he’s the commander of a massive empire known for conquering kingdoms. Of course he’s going to be good at military strategy and planning 😭 The reaction felt so exaggerated that it unintentionally weakened the aura the book was trying to build around him.

The same thing happened with Essiya’s narration. Sometimes her humour genuinely landed for me and made her feel distinct. Other times, it felt like the book was trying a little too hard to make her seem chaotic and quirky. The dramatic laughing, the theatrical outbursts, the snide remarks, threatening frogs every few chapters… sometimes it worked, sometimes it pushed her into caricature territory. Instead of deepening her trauma, the constant dramatics occasionally made it harder for me to take her seriously.

>"I wanted to cut him open and compare our bones to understand why his gave him grace and mine gave me back pain."

And unfortunately, this also affected the romance a bit. I understood the tension between them, but I didn’t always fully buy the emotional progression. I could see the framework of the relationship more than I could actually feel it developing.

Too much lore, not enough breathing room

The pacing and worldbuilding also dragged the story down for me.

There is a lot of lore in this book: kingdoms, rulers, magical history, blood summits, visions, ancient conflicts, titles, factions, political systems, memories, prophecies… and I could absolutely tell Sara Hashem put a huge amount of effort into building this world.

But the delivery often felt heavy, but not rich in execution.

Sometimes it genuinely felt like I was being given a fantasy history lecture in the middle of scenes instead of naturally discovering the world through the story. And because the narrative jumps so frequently between present scenes, memories, visions, dreams, and exposition, the overall flow started feeling patchy after a while.

The fantasy tournament should’ve hit harder

Also, I need to talk about the Alcalah because this is where the book personally betrayed me.

You cannot give me a deadly magical tournament involving monsters, hallucinations, survival trials, political stakes, and champions… and then not fully deliver.

The setup sounded incredible. The execution felt underwhelming.

A lot of the training gets skimmed over through time jumps, and when the trials finally happen, they never felt quite as intense or strategic as I wanted them to. I wanted more danger, more tension, more “holy shit” moments. Instead, the romance often took centre stage while the fantasy and action elements faded into the background.

The most interesting relationship wasn’t the romance

The Soraya reveal also frustrated me because I actually found the emotional conflict there far more interesting than the book fully explored. The book makes it clear that Soraya did love Essiya. She admits Essiya was her “amari” and says she would have spared her if she could, while still insisting there could be “no blood claim to the throne.”

That is such a tragic and morally complicated conflict.

Soraya loved Essiya, but she loved her political vision for Jasad more, or at least believed that vision required Essiya’s death along with her corrupted family tree. To me, that complexity was far more compelling than simple betrayal, but the narrative focused so heavily on Essiya’s hurt that it flattened some of the nuance.

A book full of great ideas that never fully came together

And honestly, that sums up most of my feelings on the book as a whole.

There are so many compelling ideas here: traumatised royalty, inherited violence, identity, political ambition, survival, morally messy relationships. The ingredients are all there. The book has atmosphere, ambition, and moments of genuine brilliance.

But for me, the execution just didn’t fully come together.

That being said… I’m still probably going to read book 2 because I need to know what happens next.