The Last Bloodcarver - Vanessa Le

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆☆☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆☆☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"In the harsh, industrial city of Theumas, she is seen not as a healer as she was meant to, but a monster that kills for pleasure. And in the city's criminal underbelly, the rarest of monsters are traded for gold. When Nhika is finally caught by the infamous Butchers, she's auctioned off to the highest bidder - a mysterious girl garbed in white. But this strange buyer doesn't want to use Nhika as an assassin or a trophy piece. She intends to use Nhika's bloodcarving to heal the last person who saw her father's killer.

As Nhika delves into the investigation amid Theumas's wealthiest and most powerful, all signs point to Ven Kochin, an alluring yet entitled physician's aide intent on casting her out of his opulent world. But despite his relentless attempts to push her away, something inexplicable draws Nhika to him. When she discovers Kochin is not who he claims to be, Nhika must face a greater, more terrifying evil, turning her quest for justice into a fight for her life.

Her only chance to survive lies in a terrible choice - become the dreaded monster the city fears, or risk destroying herself and the future of her kind."

📚📚📚 

I've been making a concerted effort to read all the books I buy this year, which includes my random monthly book subscriptions. This is one that I've been curious about, and I got into it right away. It was a bedtime read, and I finished it in four nights. It was hard to put down, and honestly if I wasn't exhausted from iron deficiency and a pup recovering from surgery who wakes me up over and over every night, I would probably have stayed up past my bedtime to finish it even faster. 

I found the premise super interesting, and I loved Nhika and her very complicated relationship with her mysterious rescuer, the woman in white, and her family. Without spoilers, I will say that I unraveled the mystery pretty early on in the book, but even with my strong suspicions of what was going on, the story pulled me in. I think my last night of reading I had about a hundred and fifty pages left, and I refused to go to bed without finishing it. Crushing decision, because some of the last hundred and fifty pages are so heartbreaking, so then when I went to sleep I was very sad. But it was so good! 

The only downside to having read this book...is that now the other book subscription books I need to read from this year all sound scary and kind of horror-y and not necessarily my vibe. 😭 I guess there's a reason I left them for last.