Thanks to HarperCollins and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this to review! Shaun David Hutchinson is probably one of my favorite YA authors, and I was super excited to dive into this historical fantasy.

Let’s start with the characters. One thing Hutchinson is always great at is writing characters that maybe you don’t always love, but you really enjoy reading about them. In this book, we get narration from both Jack and Wilhelm. Immediately, you feel for Wilhelm, who’s been trapped in this incredibly abusive relationship from the beginning. Jack is a bit more of a morally ambiguous character, but you can definitely tell that he has a good heart. The two of them have a lot of great chemistry, and they are what make this book worth it.

However, I think the pacing overall for this book is mostly what threw me off. At first, time passes incredibly quickly, skipping over weeks at a time. It slows down a bit in the middle, but for me, this made for a kind of odd reading experience. I think the book could have been shorter and the story still would have been just as effective.

There were also some moments with the narration that I was just taken out of the story. At times, it seems like maybe the narrators are talking directly to the reader, and at other times, it doesn’t. For example, there’s a moment toward the beginning when something is said in French, and then the narrator says it will be translated from then on. It was little details like that that took away from the overall story.

While this is a promising historical fantasy, it just fell a little bit flat to me. You never know what you’re going to get with a Hutchinson book, and this was definitely the case here. 
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I have mixed feelings about this one. The characters were great, but some of the plot and pacing felt off to me. More to come in a full review soon!