Full disclosure: I received a free ebook of this through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and I'd like to thank the publisher for the opportunity to read this!

I had a push-pull relationship with this book as I read it; I had a really hard time getting into the book, as I found the early chapters to be somewhat slow. Part of that is my own struggle with diving into new worlds, but I think part of it was because I weirdly couldn't tell if this was supposed to be set in the real world or in a fantasy land? So much of it is pretty clearly drawn from research, to the point where sometimes, especially early on, it felt like something of an infodump, things that were included to show off the research. That isn't terrible per se, just not really my thing when it comes to incorporating it into the story.

That being said, once I got past the initial hump, I really blew through this book and mostly enjoyed myself! The plot is pretty compelling and moves at a good rapid pace and

the ending definitely leaves you really really wanting the next book!

The characters slowly came to life and the magical aspects of the book are really pretty damn cool and interesting.

I have sort of two major things that make me feel :\ about this book though. The first is a spoiler.

The whole rape plotline was... bizarre. My reaction may be a side effect of the culture we're currently in as I read this book, but having your main character be drugged and nearly raped, only to have her shrug it off and have to continue to work with her abuser just??? I was confused???? By that choice???? Where it seems like it's not that big a deal until the very end?? Idk it just was a weird choice that threw me way off and I was pretty uncomfortable with the way it was handled narratively.

The second thing that made me uncomfortable was the whole thing where it seemed like Nightingale was implying--and maybe I was reading too much into this--that the players were like Rromani people? Which? I had a lot of uncomfortable feelings about in terms of if that was supposed to be taken literally, how I was supposed to grapple with that, were there things being appropriated I just missed out on? I did not see any thanks to a sensitivity reader, maybe Nightingale had one, I'm not sure, but it was something that made me uncomfortable that I wanted to highlight.

I did overall enjoy the story of the book though, and was glad for the opportunity to read it! If you like theater and fantasy Renaissance Europe especially this may really be your thing.