The Other Side of the Lie

There is a category of book that exists because readers demanded it, and A Soul of Ash and Blood is squarely in it. Stephenie Meyer did it with Midnight Sun. Sarah J. Maas has flirted with it. Armentrout committed.

This is From Blood and Ash retold from Casteel's perspective: the same events, the same timeline, the same conversations, seen from inside the head of the man who arrived in Masadonia with a plan and watched it disintegrate.

Why It Works Better Than It Should

The obvious risk with a POV retelling is redundancy. We know the plot. We know the twist. We know how it ends.

What saves this one is that Casteel's book is a fundamentally different genre from Poppy's. Hers is a coming-of-age about a woman discovering that her cage was built by people who claimed to love her. His is a slow-motion disaster about a man executing a plan he stops believing in around the halfway point and cannot admit to himself.

Watching him construct justifications (she is leverage, this is necessary, Malik is worth it) while every choice he makes quietly contradicts them is genuinely compelling. Armentrout writes self-deception well, and Casteel spends six hundred pages lying to himself considerably more effectively than he lies to Poppy.

The Kieran material is the unexpected pleasure. The wolven bond, treated as background in the original, becomes a full relationship here, and Kieran's exasperated commentary on Casteel's disintegrating composure is the funniest writing in the series.

The New Material

This is not purely a retelling. Interspersed are chapters from Casteel's captivity under the Blood Crown: the fifty years the earlier books referenced but never depicted.

These sections are the strongest thing in the book and the hardest to read. Armentrout does not sensationalise them, and their placement between scenes of Casteel charming Poppy at the Red Pearl gives the whole novel a doubled quality: a man performing effortlessness over something that never healed.

Where It Struggles

It is long. Six hundred pages to retell a story readers already know is a considerable ask, and the middle third (where the plot beats are most familiar and the new material thinnest) drags noticeably.

The revelations land differently when you know them. Scenes constructed for suspense in the original become scenes of dramatic irony here, which is interesting once and repetitive by the fifth instance.

And it is entirely inaccessible to new readers. This is a book for people who have finished at least four other books, which is fine, but it means the audience is narrow by design.

The Velvet Coven Verdict

A Soul of Ash and Blood is a companion novel that justifies itself, which is rarer than it should be. Casteel's interiority is more interesting than his exterior ever suggested, the captivity chapters fill in the series' most significant gap, and Kieran finally gets the page time he has deserved since book two.

Read it after The War of Two Queens, not after book one. The captivity material means more when you know what it cost him, and the retelling reads better as a companion than as a replacement.

If you loved Casteel, this will make you love him more and hurt considerably more about it.

Content note: Depicts captivity, torture and sexual violence in flashback. Explicit sexual content.

Quick Reference

  • Author: Jennifer L. Armentrout
  • Published: July 2023 (Blue Box Press)
  • Series: Blood and Ash, Book 5: Casteel's POV
  • Setting: Masadonia, the Rise, and the Blood Crown's captivity
  • Tropes: Male POV retelling, self-deception, trauma, found family, slow burn
  • Spice level: 4/5, explicit
  • Status: #1 NYT Bestseller