shelbyfayy 's review for:

To Snap a Silver Stem by Sarah A. Parker

3.75

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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Rating: 3.75 stars

Spice: 🌶️🌶️

Tropes:

✔️Dark romance

✔️Fae/fae adjacent 

✔️Fairytale retelling

✔️Forbidden romance

✔️Forced proximity

✔️Secret identity/disguise

✔️One night stand

✔️Morally grey hero

✔️Fated mates(?)

✔️Cliffhanger ending

I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about this series. It’s so odd. I absolutely devour these books in one sitting, and yet I come away questioning everything, understanding nothing, and wondering what is even the point of it all? Yet the fascination doesn’t end. Ugh. 

This book picks up where the last left off. Orlaith is traveling south to join her promised. She meets danger, betrayal, and mutiny head-on, sometimes coming away the victor, other times barely surviving. She herself isn’t sure what she wants at this point. She remembers too much of her past, and she blames herself for things that were well outside her control. After she reaches the southern islands, she embarks on an absolute bender of self-destruction, intent on punishing herself for her perceived crimes. Every wrong decision she can make, she makes it on purpose. Every single action she can take to hurt herself, she makes. I won’t mind this so much if it’s all on a journey to make her a stronger, more secure character, but even I can only take so much self-hatred. She does also begin to seek out others like herself, desperate to learn more about the history that’s been hidden from her. In the background of this, we get new POVs that only add to the immersion of the world. 

Rhordyn has somehow changed immensely since the first book. Whatever was holding him back there seems to no longer apply, and he pursues Laith just as he warned her he would: relentlessly and doggedly. He does seem a bit more determined to be open with her in this instance as well, after expressing surprise at how much she’s changed and grown. Perhaps he’d been withholding information in the first only due to her trauma and her own self-isolation, and now that she’s more willing to “live,” he feels he can give her more of the tough answers she seeks. All of this culminates and simmers until it eventually boils over into an intense cliffhanger ending. 

We don’t really get any more answers or resolution in this book, only more questions. Parker throws us a few crumbs of information and plot, and we lick it up from the floor like the desperate little readers we are. But still nothing really makes sense. We’re as in the dark as Laith is. This is mostly why I’m docking points. I don’t mind character-driven books, but there is some plot going on here. I would expect a little bit more resolution by the end of two entire books in a series, not a continued build-up of confusion. And yet I’m still here reading and intrigued, so I guess it’s my own damn fault. 

The relationship between the MCs is only slightly less toxic than before. As I said above, Rhordyn in book one had been obsessed with Orlaith getting out of her tower, going past their stone boundary line in order to see more of the “real world” and live. Orlaith was the one terrified to do so. Now that she’s out and showing more fire and brimstone in her character than anyone had a right to expect, it seems to me like Rhordyn has decided to treat her slightly more like an equal like a frightened child. He answers most of her questions, he gives her the freedom to make her own mistakes and live her own life. I still think their power dynamic is unbalanced and probably always will be, but it’s a step in the right direction. Well, until that ending it was. 

What are you trying to do to us, Sarah?!?!