Ella Stone

Much better than I expected.
My main problem was that there are quite a few major and glaring plotholes. None of them is a complete game-breaker for me so I could just intentionally suspend disbelief but what makes them worth pointing out is how blatantly obvious they all are. I can't imagine them being just an oversight.

It was surprisingly hard to keep up with all the happenings especially early on because the book very much reads like a continuation of a series and not like the first book.
This is indeed the case. There exists a series of short stories but they are listed as the "Dark Creatures Prequel Collection" and calling something a "Prequel" explicitly generally implies to me that it is a later addition to a series of events that happened chronologically before the original series. But judging from the release dates of these books it seems like this is not actually the case here. The prequel really is the prequel in every sense and probably should be read before this series. I could work out everything important for the plot and to understand all the character motivations but it felt a bit rushed and crammed probably because I missed out on previous character and relationship development.

On one hand, I am intrigued by the end which is fortunately not the horrible cliffhanger ending it seemed to steer towards, but on the other hand, I am not sure if it is a good idea to get deeper into the worldbuilding considering how spotty and unbelievable the bits in this book already were. Continuing might actually ruin my experience if the worldbuilding doesn't improve by quite a lot which my experience generally doesn't happen.

Edit: It was even worse than I feared. The second book is a complete shitshow front to back.
All the details I gave the benefit of the doubt turned out just as bad as I feared and sometimes even worse. I have to subtract a star after knowing how bad it really gets.… (altro)