Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5) Wow. What a doozy. I originally had anticipates something more clean-cut but Harkness surprised me. She wrote Elizabethan England quite well and the Roman Empire was really great as well. She captured the essences of each world perfectly and I loved everything. Each character was absolutely lovely and I gave my heart to SO many of them. Jack, Annie, the Earl... Each of them were so likeable! Especially Goody and Corra. Harkness also inserted a lot of side events that sometimes bored me but I absolutely LOVED Philippe. He was a great father figure, and his interactions with Diana made me smile. Speaking of fathers... We get to meet Diana's! Stephen was exactly how I imagined him to be. (Plus, his appearance was very unexpected for me too.) ALSO. Marcus and Phoebe. THAT IS MY NEW OTP. Oh my god. I love them. We only got a short introduction of them... and we didn't even find out how they got together!! Darn you Harkness. I was looking forward to that. :-(( BTW ANYONE NOTICE CORRA? THAT TOTALLY REMINDED ME OF THE LEGEND OF KORRA. In this novel, we really get to see Diana and Matthew in their married life, and I felt that that their relationship was so much better written than in the first book. They had real issues, and they got through them in a realistic way... and I actually really loved their dynamic in this book. Surprisingly, they actually handled the miscarriage less severely than I would have imagined. Overall, I felt that the "darkness" Matthew was experiencing was quite realistic and wasn't extremely eye-roll-inducing like in other vampire books. Funny... Diana even talked about those sappy vampire rape books in the novel. That made me laugh. (lol) Anyways. although Harkness really indulged in the world and spent a great deal of time within it, I felt that the pacing worked well, and everything was really well written. Highly recommend!!! (Albeit it is a bit long... but you should be used to that.)