What I liked about this book is that it shows the strength in patience, mercy and healing as opposed to violence.
However, I didn't really connect with this book, probably for the following reasons: It's clear early on that this story is told by Avala in retrospect, she even uses phrases like "[...]even though I didn't know it then" ord "I should learn later on [...]". That isn't a problem in itself, in this case it just disconnected me from the story, because I felt like looking at situations that are highly emotional, while not feeling any of these emotions, because of the way Avala was telling the story. It never felt like she was experiencing anything that the reader could experience with her. Something that also played into this effect is the way she used filter words quite often, for example "I saw that it was my grandmother" instead of "It was my grandmother". I think this is why there are sooo many things happening in this book, but it still feels very slow.
I also felt like things weren't easy to achieve and there was a lot Avala had to go through to reach her goals, but we never see her struggle in a relatable way, she just seems to learn something new (really cool magic stuff that isn't explained at all) and everything is fine and then they make a plan and the plan works out and ... Idk, to me it felt like it was very clear where everything was going and the book didn't even try to catch you offguard; the biggest plot twist for me was that there wasn't a plot twist.
 

Also: Why the fuck do they talk about this big bad emperor all the time that then gets defeated within like one or two chapters? I didn't get how he was so unprepared for everything. Earlier on we learn that he is the one of two people with the most impressive mind powers - which means he can create illusions, he can walk in peoples memories, he can travel with his mind to observe people far away from him. Why didn't he see the plan in the memories of people who tried to arrest him? Why didn't he know about their plan by observing Embry from afar? Idk, either I there's something that I didn't understand about the way the magic works (which I would not be surprised by since there isn't much of an explanation fpr anything) or it was underdeveloped.

 

Yeah Idk, I can see how you can like this book and I can imagine that it was very intentionally written the way it was written, it just didn't do it for me at all. - Liked the message though and also enjoyed the romance subplot.