What is your opinion?
5 star
"Fantastic read, well worded and well paced. "
Hot!
"Devoured this in one sitting. Blackwood Academy is dripping with atmosphere — gothic, cold, and genuinely unsettling in the best way. The mystery around Leo's death kept me guessing right up until the reveal, and I loved that the scholarship boys felt like a real found family, not just background noise. And it was the best spice! "
I did not sleep until I finished this
"Okay, I need everyone to understand I read this in one sitting and then stared at my ceiling for twenty minutes afterward. Blackwood Academy is one of those settings that feels like its own character — the moor, the cold, the gargoyles, the whole gothic weight of the place pressing down on every scene. I was fully there. The prose does so much atmospheric heavy lifting without ever feeling like it's padding for time. Wren/Erik is such a compelling lead. I loved that this wasn't written as a "chosen one solves mystery alone" story — she's working with fragments, piecing together things other people hand her or half-reveal, and having to interpret rather than just collect. It felt more like real investigative work than the usual thriller shortcut, and it made her feel competent in a grounded way rather than a movie-genius way. And can we talk about the found family with the scholarship boys?? Chidi, Felix, Tom, Peter, Rajiv, Liam, Marcus — I was NOT expecting to cry over side characters this hard. The boathouse scene where they talk about Leo absolutely wrecked me. That's the emotional core of the book for me honestly, as much as anything else going on. Now. Thorne. Listen — I want to be really clear going in with the content warnings that this book is upfront about what it is. He is not a good man and the book does not pretend otherwise. What got me was how the story keeps that tension alive the whole way through — you're never allowed to fully relax into "this is just a romance," because the coercion is baked into the foundation of everything between them. That's what made it compelling to me rather than off-putting — it reads as an examination of control and dependency rather than a wish-fulfillment romance, even in the moments that are the most charged. Not for every reader, and the content warnings are there for a reason, but if you go in knowing what you're getting, it's genuinely well-executed. The reveal of who actually killed Leo genuinely surprised me — I had my money on the legacy boys the whole time (which I think is the point, the misdirection is doing real work) and the Finch/Vindicated angle recontextualizes basically everything you've read up to that point. Loved that the legacy boys got to be fully human and not just "rich bullies" — Arjun's speech about class and belonging stuck with me. Docking nothing. Immersive, unsettling, atmospheric as hell, and it earns its darkness instead of using it for shock value. Cannot wait to see if this gets a sequel because I have QUESTIONS about where Wren goes from here. "
