Ashley Mar Reads

It's taken me a while to finish this book, or get into it I guess would be more like it.  I had absolutely loved the first two books, so I went into this with extremely high expectations.  I read maybe the first one hundred fifty pages back in August and just couldn't get a feel for this book.  I found Dee irritating, Katy was too mopey, basically the only one who wasn't getting on my nerves in the slightest was Daemon.  But I mean, how could you ever be mad at Daemon?

So I put the book down for a couple of months and just recently decided to give it another go, I loved the other books so much that I thought it would be ashamed to not finish the series because Opal had a weak beginning.

I'm so glad that I did decide to pick this up again.  It was so good!  The story really began to pick up around page two hundred, and from there on I couldn't put it down.

The Katy and Daemon moments in this books are so steamy and adorable, and I absolutely loved every moment of them!  Their relationship grows so much throughout the course of this books.

I had a lot of problems with Dee in this one.  Her refusing to forgive Katy for something that, in my opinion, wasn't really her fault.  What happened in Onyx was inevitable, one way or another Blake would have gotten to her, and Dee and Adam would try to help Katy.  However the situation went down, the outcome would be the same.  I thought she was being to harsh towards Katy, though I do understand that when people are grieving it helps to have someone to blame.  The easiest person for her to blame would be Katy, so she does.

All of the characters in general develop a lot.  You really notice a transition in Katy, Daemon, Dee and all of the other central characters.  Their values stay the same, but their views change, and they really overall become better, stronger characters that work better together.

Normalcy was greatly included in this novel.  I find often as series go on the action is very consuming, and the characters don't really get much of a life.  It's just action all the time.  Between the mini climaxes Katy and Daemon got to have a life and a relationship, and to be people.  This helped bring life to the story.

The ending completely blew me away, but in a way I was expecting something like it.  You know when you have a number of pages left and everything is seemingly resolved that something is going to go wrong.  But the raw emotion I could feel coming from Katy and Daemon at the end was heart breaking.

I enjoyed (almost) every second of this books, and I'm both excited and nervous to see where the series goes, and how Armentrout is going to twist and resolve things in the next two books.