This was almost a DNF but there was so little substance I was blowing thru it quickly and kept with it. It didn’t get any better by the end of it tho.

The dialogue was as mechanical and stilted as the characters. It was bizarre how it would volley back-and-forth with single sentences each between the characters. Often the sentences would be as little as 2 to 3 words like they were trying to save their breath and couldn’t afford to say anything of worth. The repetitiveness of the dialogue also didn’t help. The exact same phrases would show up a couple chapters later, sometimes multiple times.

To make matters worse, Nathaniel was terrible at his job as a spy. He didn’t know how to blend in, wasn’t observant, is extremely simple, and had no clue what was going on around him half the time. And Dinah was a 20 year old who acted like a 12 year old - impulsive, naive, obsessed with and wholly (weirdly) dependent on her sister. The romance between the two felt very forced.

Overall it was just such a surface story without substance, and was not believable at all, and honestly rather annoying.