STILL HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK BUT PLEASE DO NOT BUY THE US COPY! GET THE UK! THE US PUBLISHER HAS NOT BEEN PAYING THE AUTHOR ROYALTIES AND LOST THE COPYRIGHT BECAUSE OF IT BUT REFUSES TO STOP SELLING IT!

Thank you to the author for making the eARC available to me.

This is (I believe) the first book I've read in 2019 that is going on my "Best of the Year" bookshelf! Simply put: this book is absolutely amazing and I cannot believe it's a debut book!

Oh hell yes to this whole book! I had absolutely no damn clue who was good or evil for 99% of this book and the mystery murder freaking GOT ME! The characters are so well developed and there's so much "who done it" on the entire cast of like 12 characters! I did NOT see the lineage reveal! The internal politics were so well developed but not info dumping. I freaking NEED the sequel! So bad! I was like panting for the last 1/2 of the book! Hesina is such a well written strong female queen being realistic and struggling with all the political turmoil she is dropped into. She's so smart and ambitious and just YES. I'm also high key obsessed with her relationship with Akira. I Just...I cannot wait for people to read this so I can talk about the absolute hot mess chaos Hesina deals with in the last 1/2!

Moral of the story: don't be a douche canoes to people who are different and don't assume you know a whole group of people!