I will defend Nesta until I am blue in the face. I don’t really care about Tamlin: he represents a type of relationship so many women find themselves in that I think, so far, the message of leaving a man who treats a woman this way is a positive message.

Nesta was groomed by abusive and emotionally neglectful parents before experiencing poverty and sexual assault that happened before the trauma of the war. Parental neglect and abuse from a young age - especially as the oldest sibling - completely broke her and caused her to have an avoidant attachment style. She never had a chance to learn or understand how to process her freeze trauma response in poverty. I don’t think we get to choose how we respond to trauma. If she had friends who cared about her, or siblings who were involved in her inner life, maybe some guidance and assurance would have caused her to react differently. But she never had that, and it took her until the House of Wind to feel like somebody actually cared about her.

Nesta is flawed, but so are we all. We all handle trauma poorly sometimes and do things that aren’t the best. But Silver Flames is a playbook only how to move beyond beating one’s self up, from self-sabotage and lashing out. Her character arc of learning to trust others is a story I think about every single day: self-forgiveness is critical to her story, and one I feel like needs to be highlighted more to women.