I enjoyed the first half of this novel but by the end of the story I just wanted everything to be wrapped up and finished. I was expecting this novel to be a story about building a life in a new place and finding both yourself and found family as well as speaking to homesickness and being a foreigner in a new country. The first half of this book did a lot of that within the story. We get Eilis, who is young and doesn't know anything except her home and family being forced from the nest and thrown into the deep end. I'm not sure why but my favorite moment in this book had to be when Eilis is sick on the boat heading towards America, I'm not sure why but I think it's because of the irony of the situation. When Eilis and her roommate can get back at the women in the cabin next door who locked them out of the bathroom, by locking them out of the bathroom at retribution. 

After that moment the book, for me at least, starts to go downhill. Eilis just sort of lets life happen to her, she never really seems to make her own decisions but rather just lets others tell her what she should do and is fine with just going along with that. I just don't think we see her character grow and take her agency within the story and in her life. Like when she starts dating Tony and it doesn't feel like she is falling in love and when he starts saying that he loves her, she just goes along with it and says it back not because she is deeply in love with him but rather because that's just the expected thing and the next step in the relationship. Another issue I had was when Eilis received her first letters from home since moving to Brooklyn and was hit with severe homesickness. First of all, she can't even seem to name what emotions she is feeling and doesn't even seem to know what homesickness is. But then when her new community seems like it might begin to form and start coming together to support her and teach her how to cope it's simply said that she should start taking classes to distract her from those feelings. Then the homesickness is rarely mentioned again, so the message is just keep busy you'll be fine these feelings aren't worth addressing and instead should be ignored because they'll just go away. 

Though there were plenty of other things that I didn't love about this book and so many interesting things mentioned that could have been built off of by the author, Eilis's teacher, why Tony doesn't look like the rest of his family, etc., none of them are developed and just become missed opportunities. But the one thing that cemented that this wasn't going to be a new favorite was the ending. When Eilis just doesn't know if she's going to go back to her life in America or return to Ireland. She just keeps flip-flopping on which option she should choose. She went from saying "I love Tony" to "It was all just a dream, he's so foreign" (not an actual quote). It becomes even more clear that she is just letting her life carry her along and isn't making any of her own decisions when she is back home. Her mother and friends push her to stay and settle down with Jim, a man she has already said she didn't like previously but now is not so bad. Her lack of will and opinion in what happens in her own life is truly brought home when she is forced to decide by her old boss. Her old boss had heard some secondhand gossip from Eilis's landlord back in America that someone potentially saw her at the courthouse with Tony before she left for Ireland. So even whether she stays in Ireland or returns to America is decided by other people and circumstances. 

Before that ending this book was sitting at a low 3-star book but just with how Eilis was acting, and the ending of the novel just lowered that whole story to a 2-star. 

I want to say that this book overall had the potential to be an amazing first installment to a new series. I thought the world was interesting and unique and there were interesting stakes and the premise of magic vs science is such a cool concept. To say that I was very excited to read this book would be an understatement. However, as much as I honestly wanted to love this book I had a hard time due to the character development.

I didn't buy the MMC and FMC's love story, our FMC, Ruying, went from hating the Romans and anyone associated with them to falling in love with one of the princes. That would have been fine however we skipped over the first six months of their relationship where they would have supposedly begun to fall in love. So for me, it felt very insta-love which isn't my favorite trope and just made the relationship so much less believable. Not to mention because we didn't have those building blocks moments for their character development and relationship the choices Ruying was making didn't make sense and were at times more than a little confusing. I understand that the author was trying to write morally grey characters and also play around with the idea of what if our main character wasn't brave but gave into her more cowardly urges. Which in theory could be very interesting, but I don't think she pulled it off as well as I hoped, and left me as the reader wondering why anyone would think that Ruying's choices made any sense for her family and people's long-term survival.

There was also the odd choice of putting in a lot metaphors within the text which I didn't love since it drew me out of the book and felt forced in there just for the sake of being there. I would have much preferred if the author had made those metaphors as the chapter title or something like that so that the writing didn't feel as forced and clunky.

I'd say this was a very low 3 star (probably more like 2.75), I believe that this has a lot to do with the fact that this is the author's debut novel and so she hasn't quite perfected her craft. I'm leaning towards trying the next book to see if things come together and get better, because like I said before I can see the potential of what the author was trying to do. I thought the world was interesting and we were just starting to get information at the end of this book that could explain some of the mysteries this world had.