This book, in particular, for this trilogy, had me heavily debating not finishing it at one point. Which may not coincide with a 4-star review all that well, but is still facts. For the beginning of this book, I started to become uninterested in developments, early on. And I literally put the book down for over a week because I wasn't interested in what was happening, or the apparent direction the book was taking. That, and the fact that book 2 was a noticeable step-down in quality for me, had me reconsidering my reading options for a while. I literally read an entire other book during this break, in fact. However, I convinced myself to pick it back up and give it a little more of a try before deciding to do anything as dramatic as DNF the final book of a trilogy I'd been reading. And it didn't take long to get to more interesting developments and add other interesting people. The whole book gets better after Ceri joins it. But I think that's more coincidental than anything.
I get tired of all the 'let's talk about our feelings' scenes in this one. And I get tired of what feels like so much rehashing of feelings from our two main characters. I wanted the action, and in some cases, I just wanted to focus on other characters. I was more invested in Death and the princess than I was the wolf and the lion at the end. Not gonna lie. And this book is just an underlining of the fact that this is "Found Family, the Trilogy". That doesn't stop for book 3. At all. But some of the found family stuff is pretty satisfying, honestly.
And I have to give this book a lot of benefit of the doubt to give it a 4-star rating because there is something that happens at the end that is utter nonsense. And I have to pretend like it wasn't, to rate it this high. Soft spoilers from here:
There is a situation, where the wolf's faction have to do something, or they will be brutally murdered by political rivals. Then they put together a ruse to undermine that task, while talking about how getting caught will get them brutally murdered. Then they make it very very clear that they had that ruse going DURING THE TASK, and nothing comes of it. It's like no one cares that they OBVIOUSLY cheated at the task they were given. They actually announced it pretty dramatically, if you think about it. But, I have opted to pretend it wasn't as nonsense as it actually was, since I still enjoyed it overall, even if I know, the more I think about it, the more that story climax portion falls apart.