Phantasma

“Ophelia was now the eldest Grimm. A dead mother made her much more than an orphan.”

Kaylie Smith uses heavy foreshadowing to build a rising sense of dread and tension about what Ophelia’s mother’s death means for the narrative. She is an orphan, but she is also the heir to the Grimm family magic. This line introduces the theme of The Impact of Legacy, which will play a large role in Ophelia’s character arc.

“Meanwhile, of all her mother’s lessons growing up, Ophelia found the ones about the Nine Circles of Hell particularly enthralling. More than the hours and hours of lectures about how to reanimate corpses to do your bidding, how to talk to the dead, and how to avoid being possessed…the tales of the territories of Hell had always been Ophelia’s macabre fascination of choice.”

Ophelia’s fascination with the Devils and Circles of Hell foreshadows her eventual relationship with Blackwell and his true identity as the Prince of Devils. It also hints at the fact that Ophelia has inherited the soul of Blackwell’s mortal lover, Angel, and will be the one to finally free him from Phantasma. The reference to the nine circles of Hell is an allusion to Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the first section of his 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy. The names of the levels in Phantasma correspond to the circles of Hell in Inferno.

“Like one of the dark romance novels she’d read in Grimm Manor’s library when she couldn’t sleep.”

Smith makes a metatextual reference to the romantasy genre on the page through Ophelia’s fascination with dark romance novels. Ophelia is a character in a dark romance novel who reads dark romance novels, adding a layer of self-aware