This book probably inspires (and will continue to inspire) people to love, hate, or love to hate it. I’m giving it five stars not because I think it’s perfect, but because I personally do love it.

Part of the problem, of course, is that this format of poetry is still being dismissed as “tumblr poetry” — angsty teenage girls who let their souls spill through their fingers, through the keyboard and onto the screen; like Internet linguistics in general, it takes some getting used to for some, and will never be accepted by others. Me, I like how the poems are short and accessible, impact packed in images and implications rather than lovely lyrical lines of verse. Not that either is better than the other! I love both, at different times and for different reasons and purposes, and there is more than enough room for both in the world.

Also, if you try to read this as a collection of separate poems, rather than the narrative it is meant to be, you will absolutely miss the forest for the trees. Its value isn’t in the individual poems — though some of them do stand out — but rather in the picture of a princess who becomes a damsel who becomes a queen, a bookmad girl who has been hurt but finds that she can love again, and that she is worthy of love: her own, the only kind that truly matters when you come down to it. (I suspect that some people could better appreciate this book if they could learn to see it as a different form of storytelling rather than comparing it to their idea of poetry.)