I liked Dark Rise! I don't think it has as much substance as Captive Prince does, and I'm not in love with it, but it hits me directly in the id and I enjoy Will and actually really like Violet—she's got kind of a knight to liege thing going on with Will and they're good friends and there is absolutely no hint of romantic tension between them, which I appreciate very much.

I actually completely hated the Library at Mount Char—my read on it is mostly that it's a novel's worth of deeply felt need for male authority figures' cruelty to be justified, need coming specifically from the side of the authority figure—but it is quite widely liked, and I thought you might find some of the (somewhat incomplete) worldbuilding interesting; it struck me as the kind of thing where you'd be like, this was the most interesting part of the book and we mostly focused on these much less interesting things 😂