This book had so many things going for it. The main character is a girl named Alexa pretending to be a boy named Alex not only to escape a life of rape and horrors as an orphan girl, but also because she has an unusual ability to fight. She is the best soldier in the Prince's elite guard and puts duty above all else, even if that means serving the bratty prince of an even worse king. Sounds amazing, doesn't it?
That's where everything goes down hill. Turns out, she has not been as successful in keeping her secret as she thought.

Spoiler

She walks into what she believes to be the enemy's den (possibly the people who killed her brother, although this was never actually explained) and VOILA! They know she's a girl. Somehow. Inexplicably. With all-powerful magic that can apparently not give them an edge in their rebellion against a tyrannical king... Then, her closest friend in the guard tells her that HE has ALWAYS known that she was a girl, simply because he heard her brother call her by a girl's name (which is apparently irrefutable truth). THEN the Prince starts acting less like a brat and more like a knight in shinning armor and eventually reveals that he TOO has always known she was a girl.

So now everyone basically knows and apparently if a guy knows she's a girl, then he must be in love with her. Alexa's bad-ass character suddenly turns into a simpering, whiny, love-struck wimp. All of a sudden instead of saving the day, she needs to be saved by the male characters, and instead of being a mask of inscrutable secrecy, her emotions run rampant. As if this is how girls must act in order to be feminine. This book took such a 180-turn from feminist girls-can-do-anything to masochistic girls-are-weak-and-governed-by-emotion. I won't even go into how the whole middle section was basically the same scene over and over again. It is my profound wish that the beginning and the end could be mashed together, cutting out the middle with all the sighing and staring into bright blue eyes as hearts race thing. My hopes were raised so high and all were dashed upon the rocks that was this choppy book.