Bookish Virginia

Thank you to the author and Book of Matches Media for providing me with an eARC of this book in return for participating on the tour and giving my unbiased review.

There are a lot of things to like about this book. It is a rich world that is great for those of us who love ALL the magical creatures: we’ve got light and dark fae, mer-creatures (who are vicious), wielders of light and dark magic, pixies, elves, and many more. The author has done a great job of building a rich, kind of terrifying, and definitely compelling world and I was eager to read more so I could learn more about it. For that reason alone, I’m looking forward to book two.

Our main character Winter has the future she thought she had laid out before her ripped away and changed dramatically in the first chapters of the book, and it was definitely shocking. (No spoilers here though!) I won’t say I loved Winter, or even really liked her, for a lot of the book. She is so naive and brash, and there were times I just wanted to shout, “Why oh why must you always do the *wrong* thing?” But somehow, despite not really liking her much, I became attached to her, and by the end I was rooting for her.

I would say the action in this book moves very quickly, and at times Garcia didn’t really flesh things out as much as I’d like. I had questions and didn’t always understand exactly what was happening. But this could definitely be personal preference. If you like a lot of fast action, and for it to not always be explained, then you might be just fine with it.

I also can’t really decide whether I like Winter’s betrothed, Blaise, but I don’t want to say a lot about that, to avoid spoilers. I do look forward to seeing where Garcia takes the relationships and the story in the next book, as I am really not sure what to expect: will she stay with Blaise? Or will she end up with someone else, say Cedric?

In summary, this may not be my favorite YA fantasy of January, but I think there’s a lot of potential here. I am so glad book two, the Princess of Nothing, is coming out in just a few weeks!