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The Gilded Blade by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. Rating: 4.5 stars.

Read from August 11th to 13th.

This is how you end a series! What the hell. I've been reading for hours upon hours today so coming out of it into the real world is a bit disorienting for me right now. The plan wasn't to spend a whole afternoon and part of an evening reading on the couch but needs must. I found the middle to the end of the novel to be so compulsively readable. The pace of the story, the short chapters, the way those short chapters end on micro cliff hangers to keep you reading. This one reminded me so much of reading The Inheritance Games for the first time and feeling truly mentally unwell. And that's something that has been so lacking for me in my reading lately. I want a book I get absolutely lost in. I want a book I become obsessive over. I want a book that literally takes my breath away. And Barnes has done it again.

I loved the settings in this one because the other books really made me miss Hawthorne House and getting to visit it again felt a little nostalgic for me. But we know the real highlight of The Inheritance Games series(es) is the characters. I don't know how or when I fell in love with Rohan, Savannah, and the Rohan and Savannah of it all. Because I distinctly remember not liking either of them the first time I read The Grandest Game. But then this book has me crying over them and highlighting almost whole chapters of their nonsense. It was so deliciously angsty. I also loved Gigi for the entire time I've had her in my life. I love that there is someone who sees Gigi for exactly who she is and that they realize just how strong she really is when so many people underestimate her. The emotions this book made me feel were so overwhelming at times. I cried multiple times in the book. And then there's the angst and the drama. This book also harkens back to the first book in that I kept getting taken out of the story by things in this Hawthorne world matching up with my real life a bit. Libby, her past, her nicknames, her personality. The Gilded Blade being what it was and the reason for its existence. The epilogue takes place on my birthday which was a surprise. Also, the lemniscates of it all harkens back to my wedding and getting married on 8/8 so I definitely had a few moments of getting pulled out of the novel but that's definitely a me thing and not a book problem.

The plot itself does lean into the JLB of it all. I remember the first book of hers I ever read (The Fixer) and how I thought the ending was absolutely insane. And somehow this was even more so. But written better. I felt like there was so much that had to happen in this one to make it the final book and there was so much left to explain that we were just moving at a constant clip. It felt like there were things edited out of the novel for pages sake which I wish hadn't been. I know. I know. Yet again I'm saying that a long book should have been longer. There's something wrong with me for sure. But it would have been nice to have been able to take a few seconds to breathe between all of the action.