I received this book in a past owl crate box. The premise of this book intrigued me, but I knew in the back of my head that it reminded me of ‘Six of Crows’ by Leigh Bardugo. I rated that book 5/5 stars, but unfortunately, this book just didn’t hit the mark for me. The writing itself was your basic YA writing. “Zofia’s eyes snapped shut.” EYES. DO. NOT. SNAP. This is becoming an epidemic in YA books, way too much eye snapping, it’s physically impossible for your eyes to snap. And if they do snap, then you should seek medical help immediately. But this book had way too many ways of conveying emotion through the eyes of a character, it’s very cliche. There are other ways to convey emotions. Every time this happened was taken out of the story, and it became pretty annoying. Another example of a cringey cliche, “Silence fell like a heavy blade through the air.” SMH. I have to give the author credit though, she was really good at describing the dresses that the girls wore in this book. It had a lot of dress descriptions.

I found in this book that the villain wasn’t evil enough. I felt that the author was trying to go for a Moriarty/Sherlock vibe, but it missed the mark completely. Hypnos felt more like Dr. Horrible from “Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog” if you haven’t watched this, you are really missing out on something amazing, and you should youtube it. Hypnos was trying so hard to be evil, but he just came across as a joke. If you’re going to write a villain give me a villain, get on Voldemort’s level.

One point that I did really like about the book was that the character Zofia is a very brilliant scientist. It’s nice to have female characters be portrayed as smart, but unfortunately for Zofia, it was in a very stereotypical way. She was so smart that she can’t understand humor and she took it all literally.

While reading this book, the overall feeling of the whole story felt so underwhelming. This is a book about epic heists, and there was nothing epic about them. I felt a huge disconnect to this book which is a shame because the cover is so pretty. And the book description sounded amazing. I think that if this book had gone through some more edits, it could have been a lot stronger.