Mac has been rescued from the Unseelie – and brought back
to sanity by Barrons. But in the time she was being “cured”, the Unseelie has
been free and the world has been devastated. The war is now global, Dublin is a
shell of what it once was.
Mac has to do what she can to gather the survivors
together to fight back, to stop the Sidhe-seers from sheltering and be ready to
fight, to dig up whatever information she can find in their hidden archive
And, above all, to find the Sinsar dubh and stop the Lord
Master.
Ok, let’s start with the big, yawning, horrible problem
with this book.
At the end of the last book, Mac was captured by 4 “death-by-sex” fae. Fae who are super attractive (they literally make your eyes bleed to look at them) and produce lots of woo-woo lust. Mac was captured by them, she was raped by them, she became a Pri-ya. Which means a human who is addicted to sex. Mac stayed in this state for months, constantly craving sex and Barrons stepped in and “saved” her by having sex with her lust-addicted self. He raped her, repeatedly, constantly, for months. For her own good.
No.
And
don’t even start with any excuses of narrative necessity. All of this was under
author control, it’s a story. Mac could have been cured by banana-flavoured
blancmange and a Desperate Housewives
marathon (especially if you wanted it to be a traumatic experience for her to recover
from). The evil fae who kidnapped her could have tortured her, or just held her
prisoner while the city fell apart, or just have shown her their true
appearance which apparently breaks human minds – any of these could have been
used to present Mac as being terrible wounded and needing Barrons to nurse her
back to mental health (preferably without his healing rape), none of which would
involve rape and all of which would have maintained exactly the same narrative.
The one semi-bright spot is Mac recognising that she has
been raped and not downplaying it. But even this is dimmed by the fact she now
finds Barrons even more sexually appealing than she did before he raped her.
And then there’s Barrons himself – even if I accepted all the previous as
narratively necessary (which I really really don’t), Barrons expecting Mac to
be grateful is galling. Barrons repeatedly making nasty sarcastic comments
about the time he raped her and the time she was gang raped – I have no words.
How is that close to acceptable? How is that close to what any fractionally
decent person would do? Why would he do this? Why should we not loathe him
forever for TAUNTING Mac about raping her, over and over again?
