A Strange Hymn

4,5/5🌟

3,5 ⭐️

My basic review is that I always feel bad for ragging on these with more negative than good, but I stay here because I love this is shit and I’m a sucker for these cute human & fae stories. But there is so many inconsistencies, annoying story tropes, and the plain fact the MFC is suppose to be intelligent but acts like a blundering damsel in the face of danger…. that if I wasn’t desperately in love with wanting Des & Callie to take over the world with mad night magic love…. I wouldn’t continue over the amount of frustration I felt all too often. I had to keep taking breaks with this book, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days! I read books to escape, and I found myself trying to escape this book with other books, all the while urning to come back lol. So I needed it! But I hated it lol. Sidenote; I will be continuing this series regardless of how long I need to struggle threw it. This is my life now. More in depth!Starters, the first half of the book is pretty lack luster, but you spend most of your time focusing on trying to build more on their relationship of her accepting her new self, as well as give you a glimpse into Des as a person who has a life outside of Callie’s pov of him. Which is nice!…. But again, it’s all half shrouded in mystery, and is what caused me to start to take breaks before even getting to any sort of good part!(I am excited for the novella cause I need his pov at this point!) The MC’s seemingly repulsive INABILITY to be able to simply communicate about pretty much ANYTHING becomes infuriating. Not everything needs to be some big deal to divulge. In the first book it was cute and completely understandable, but by now I feel like it just gets in the way, because it’s pretty much over EVERYTHING, and even if you get a little truth, it’s abruptly halted and told “for another time” and in it a lot of cases it becomes the reason why most of the problems even arise. If someone is your damn “mate” you’re not going to be like that with each other over all the shit!!!The survivor trope I felt started to get on my nerves as well, I feel like I missed something as to why she was so traumatized by her time with Carin in the first place. Maybe it’s just the fact I read the trigger warning dark romances, but I don’t feel like much really happened to her aside from some visits and being in a cell…. as she was never assaulted, and the magic didn’t work on her the same. But she acts like she was put through what all the other women were and then worse. Maybe it’s just a bad case of survivors guilt? Yes she was changed, but at no time did I feel like it was ever a malevolent act, I felt he was trying to protect or free her from the get go, and because he was insane, this was his way of caring for her. I feel like she is portrayed as being super intuitive and intelligent and it took entirely too long for her to come to the conclusion this could have been his motive, specially with the stuff he said…. On top of the fact that she doesn’t even for a second think that maybe he is being overtaken by another consciousness when his two personality’s are so black and white and she expresses she can see it in his eyes and feel it in his presence. I get he’s insane, but the second i read that, I was like… this guy has been taken over because his mind is already weak from being insane. She knows the king of souls talks through dreams , people and literal children, and essentially ignores her dreams or feelings of bad situations, when she has literally been handed ALL THE PROOF SHE NEEDS TO WAKE UP AND LISTEN…. But no she continues to hop and skip along right into the hands of danger at every single turn without a second thought and has the audacity to act surprised when she comes to her conclusions, but then suddenly gets annoyed when someone else walks into a trap? Every time something that is suppose to be a soul shattering revelation I just find myself rolling my eyes and saying “obviously.” You see most of this coming, from way back, and maybe that’s half of my frustration, that everything seems so obvious and she isn’t portrayed as being nieve, confused and damsel in distress… she’s a P.I with a survivors mindset of setting the whole world on fire, with the added gift of a sirens lusting scorn… so why can’t she put things together and for the love of life….. why does she keep doing dumb shit.