Review

Thank you to Knopf and NetGalley for an ARC.

I love Kaufman’s writing style. I was engrossed in this book and couldn’t put it down; there was so much to love about it. The flow especially worked for me in this book.

This book was so interesting! I love a book that deals with war and gods, and this one hit all the high marks for me — the only part I had a bit of an issue with was the pacing. The beginning (chapter 1) was a bit slow, and I was left a bit confused at first, but all of that faded off pretty quickly. However, the prologue was amazing — it made me want to keep reading. And honestly, I could use a whole prequel about that time. It was just as interesting.

One of the reasons it got four stars is because we had several POVs, and while I understood some of the choices, I just wasn’t loving some of them.

Leander/Keegan/Selly are some of the best parts of the entire book. I love their interactions, especially the banter between Leander and Selly. It made me laugh at several points.

This book did have dark aspects though — one of the main characters is a villain, Laskia (which, that was an interesting POV) and death does happen a lot in this book. I wouldn’t say it is vivid, but there are moments where I was like “oh jeeze”.

Jude is our other POV character, and I just went between aww poor guy and UGH YOU FOOL.

Anyways, this book had me feeling a lot of things. It had Fable/Daughter of the Pirate King vibes because it was shipping, but not so much pirates. In many ways to me this harkened back to Tamora Pierce, who I adore.

Also, there’s this really cool magic system.

This book is definitely going to be one I purchase, because I thought it was great. There is also a lot of diversity in many forms in this book, which I liked.

An excellent book, and I can’t believe how long I’m going to have to wait to read the next one.