4/5 stars
Possible Spoilers:
I like reading about villains' origin stories. It's always been one of my favorite genres, especially when it's well done like this one. Although we get into Levana's cruel past, we don't necessarily feel pity for her. Instead, we get a better understanding of why she does what she does in other books. At times, this book can get extremely hard to read if you are light of heart. Levana quickly changed from being pitiful to slowly become the coldhearted, calculating villain we know and hate/love. We feel a slight pity for her because we learn that she was manipulated, bullied, and tortured by her older sister. We also learn she was the cause of her face becoming disfigured, causing her to be named "the ugly princess of Luna". We see how this greatly affects her throughout that series. She always makes sure the glamour is on and is out of sight of all mirrors. Still, this isn't enough to justify all the things she says and does throughout the book. One of the lines that stuck out to me was, "Levana had not seen the bodies, but she had seen the bedrooms the next morning, and her first thought was that all that blood would make a very pretty rouge on her lips." As the book goes on, we see her sister mysteriously die after being poisoned, making Levana the queen. This only worsened her behavior, solidifying her as we know her in the main series. We still see moments of weakness and humanity, but they are very rare and are followed by horrible actions. Overall, it did a great job of helping us understand her motives without causing us to over-sympathize with her. We see how many more issues this woman has and it actually makes us see her as being worse and crazier than she is in the main series.
