This book was definitely enjoyable. I hadn’t read anything with fairies in a while, so that was fun. The mix of the fairy world and the mortal world was interesting, and I thought the worldbuilding was pretty good and easy to follow.

Jude was an interesting main character, and I liked the focus on her familial relationships, which are all very complicated. Madoc and Oriana feel like flat characters but then get fleshed out more later on, which I liked. Jude’s relationship with Madoc was especially compelling. And I really loved Vivi. She’s fantastic. But Taryn? She’s meant to be Jude’s mirror, and she even says so herself, but I didn’t really understand her or her motivations at all, so she was definitely the weakest character for me.

The politics and the action are the other compelling part of this book. There’s a lot of plot and a lot of characters, but it was never confusing and always exciting.

The romance was definitely the worst thing for me. I don’t understand why people like the romance in this book so much (or why it’s such a big part of the marketing) when it’s so underdeveloped and honestly kind of boring. Or maybe I just don’t take teen romance that seriously, but I really don’t think the author spent all that much time on that aspect of the story compared to everything else.

I would probably have rated this book a bit higher, but I hate first-person present tense except when used very intentionally, and I definitely think it was the wrong choice for this book. It bugged me the whole way through. There was one particular moment when Jude was aware that she was addressing an audience, and that just doesn't work when the book is in the present tense like that.

I might read the sequels cause I think this book set up some interesting plot points for the future, but I probably won’t do that for a while.