This book is a really strange reading experience. It's heavy and intense and dark and emotional and violent and full of death and gore and body horror, all wrapped around an ex-lovers-that-hate-each-other-but-maybe-still-love-each-other romance that very often takes a back seat to the violence and gore and etc. But it also managed to be very weird in a way that didn't exactly work. The first part of the plot is based around trying to figure out exactly what's going on - although it turns out that most of that aspect is based on one character already knowing the answer and just not sharing it with our protagonist. (I don't like intentional-non-communication-as-a-conflict-driver as a trope in general, but the fact that there's no established reason for this character to not say anything - and in fact the protagonist is involved in this whole thing because they need her to do something specific relevant to this information - is irritating and feels contrived.) Once this character finally tells the protagonist what's going on, the plot quickly becomes more about surviving to the end of the book. And I really struggled to suspend my disbelief with it. Characters acted in ways that were close to but not quite ways I'd expect real people to act. Events were just a notch or two beyond what felt reasonable. Nothing was ridiculous or excessive, and I can't even put my finger on why, but most of the last half of the book felt just slightly over-the-top. All things considered, it's not a bad book - I enjoyed the protagonist as a character, it had a lot of interesting moments and some unexpected twists, and was engaging enough to keep my attention through the end. However, I'm probably not going to read the rest of the series. From the way this one ended, I imagine book two is going to be more of the same. And even though I liked it, I didn't love it enough to continue.