3.5 Stars rounded down. This was a tiny bit of a disappointment. I will have to remember in the future that YA Fantasy is likely to have an instalove story-line that I am just not into.

There is no escaping that the world building was amazing, the prose decadent, the plot deliciously misleading and the characters well drawn (mostly in blue :)).

However, this reads very much as only part one of a three-part story. There is a tremendous amount of set up (nearly half the book). Half the characters that were introduced had nothing to do in the end – So I am assuming here that they are meant to appear in later books? This is a bit annoying as they are yet to be published.

Recommended to fans of YA Fantasy but you may like to wait until the other two books are published.