This is more of a 2.5 stars but I'm rounding up because there were a few parts of this book that I was really fond of especially near the end, but i can't get over the fact that i found it terribly overwritten. Valente seemed lost in her own prose, more concerned with crafting long flowery sentences that sounded good even if they didnt exactly mean anything that she was about fleshing out her characters, who remained flat and pretty two dimensional.