It’s difficult indeed to pull of a romance between characters from separate classes, especially when the character from the oppressed class spend the entire book full of self loathing

only to be proven correct that the pretty blond princess is worthy of the spring of magical power when our (jewish coded) protagonist is not worthy. Beautiful Sylvia literally committed war crimes, while our main character is basically guilty of lying and occasionally being a bitch.

To farther gripe the author continually has to back track to tell us information that should have been told to us as it was happening, leaving us forced to believe that we are  abandoning friends behind without help or shelter until chapters later when we get updates that they did indeed provide aid, don’t worry.  

This book had a lot of potential and should have gone through a few more rounds of edits and maybe dropped a concept or three. I enjoy faeries and romance and political intrigue and murder mysteries and unique magic systems and complex friend groups and stories about oppressed groups and folk tales and exploratory missions and war and dark academia and enemies to lovers and ghost stories and imbalanced power structures, and betrayal……..

But maybe not all at the same time. . .