I feel really bad for saying this, but this book seemed very derivative to me. It’s so similar to other YA Royalty fantasy that I’ve read in recent years that it was a bit hard to take it seriously.

I don’t think the author intentionally wrote this a riff on a trend; the marketing of the book positioned it to be compared to these other books and I think that really hurt this book. I feel that if the cover art had been different and if the marketing campaign hadn’t mentioned other similar series, this book could have stood on its own.