“Nothing stinks quite like a corpse.”

BAM! The very first words, after a brief reintroduction to the characters, slam us in the face with a reminder of the world we are re-entering. Mia is back, and after the ending from the last book, her list for vengeance has only grown instead of shrunk.

There will be some possible spoilers in this review, not for this book, but for the first, so if you have not read Nevernight, you may want to stop reading. Might I also suggest that you GO PICK UP NEVERNIGHT AND START READING!!!!!

Okay, let’s proceed…

Mia has accomplished her goal of becoming a Blade for the Church, although, not exactly as she imagined when she left Godsgrave the first time. Things have gone a bit awry, and Mia finds herself a Blade, but stuck in some small town in the Republic where she will likely never encounter the people she still intends on slaying.

“Patience, she thought. If Vengeance has a mother, her name is Patience.”

But, as we have gotten to know Mia, we know that following rules isn’t something she’s prone to doing.

Our beloved narrator is back, once again, providing us with snarky little comments and helpful pieces of history as he sees fit. I say he, but who knows who the narrator is really. While there are many, many pieces of this puzzle that I am dying to figure out, the identity of the narrator is in my top three!

Instead of getting pieces of Mia’s past as a little girl, here Kristoff has played with the plotting a little more. We start the book in the midst of Mia’s new scheme and have to snap back to fill in the gaps from where we left her in Nevernight. I actually really like how this is written, because we feel immediately drawn into action rather than a slow build.

“Never flinch. Never fear. And never, ever forget.”

And talk about action. If Nevernight has hints of a Roman empire in some far away world, Godsgrave throws us into a Gladiator Arena. Literally. Or the Godsgrave equivalent.

Kristoff has given us the introductory course to brutality in Nevernight. It’s a perfect sort of poetry that Mia is introduced to the violence of her new world as a student of the Church, and in the same way we were too. Now, we are unleashed and thrown deep into the world where we find slaves fighting for glory and the one chance for freedom. Except, Mia has other plans. She always does.

But as we discovered in Nevernight, Mia hasn’t quite lost her heart. Even though it’s been battered, and bloodied, and bruised, it’s still intact. The problem is, to accomplish her goals, to really exact the revenge she craves, she might have to lose her heart entirely.

“Little kindnesses that spoke of the biggest hearts. Mia wondered where her own might be.”

For all the harshness that this world shows us, there is such humanity in it. There’s hope, fear, love, determination, stubbornness. Everything that raises us to our best and drags us down to our worst. I love how the ideas of good and evil aren’t cookie cutter or even clear as you read. There are villains, but they aren’t always who you expect them to be. Neither are the heroes.

If you’re wondering whether this book is as violent or gory as Nevernight, I can only quote another writer who drinks the tears of his readers (Pierce Brown, Red Rising) and say, “Shit escalates.” Kristoff has raised the bar on everything in Godsgrave, and that includes the savage nature of the world. The fights are jaw dropping, heart pounding, simply stunning in their elegance and detail. You know what it is to fight in an Arena. You feel it, you hear it, you smell it.

“Dark delight in her belly. Warm blood on her hands. Mia closed her eyes. Raised her blade.”

As we race towards the end of the book, all I kept repeating in my head was no, no, no. Because there was no way I was going to get any sort of satisfaction with the pages remaining. If cliffhangers rip your heart out while it’s beating, you may want to hold off on this book. Kristoff holds your bleeding heart in his hands and laughs.

This world and these characters will crawl deep under your skin and take root. You feel as if you’ve lived in this world your entire life, and that you’ve known these characters all that time as well. These books are where book obsessions grow. And if you’re like me, you’ll ache when the book ends, and miss them as the days pass.

I am counting the days until the third (and I think final) book is released. Murder and magic may not be a combo that everyone falls in love with. But for those of you who revel in the darker side of fiction, where good and evil are a bit murkier than normal, this is a world I think you’ll fall in love with! I know I have.