Different anon who just finished it – the end was deeply satisfying as a conclusion to the read. IMO Muir laid it out well in the lead up (multiple huge hints) so it wasn’t a GOT idiot twist but natural progression of the story/their partnership. Yea i want the sequel now and just preordered but after reading a bunch of youthful fantasy romcoms (like the of fire and stars sequel), this was a really nice palate cleanser. Looking back, the ending is pretty well hinted at in the book summary!

Again, so sorry for the lateness of this reply! I’d like to pretend it was because I was worried about spoilers, but that was like 5% of it, the rest of it was just…you know. Me getting distracted by other things.

Still gonna put the rest under a cut:

I’m glad you liked it but I have to disagree with that, anon! Kind of. I never claimed it was a GOT level ending, but it still didn’t make a lot of sense to me. These endings never do, the whole point is that they’re strongly hinted at, or straight up predicted or prophesied but THEN they get subverted. And GIVEN how many small pieces of Gideon’s unfinished story we had, her mom, the other Gideon, the fact that she wasn’t killed by that one draining technique Harrow used or the poison (was that what killed all the other kids of the Ninth? Whatever that was). there’s clearly a lot left of her story and I imagine we’ll either get Harrow investigating it or Gideon back in some form in the sequel anyway, but in either case, I didn’t love it.