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Its a pretty quick and easy read. It's nothing that's blowing me away, but I'm definitely enjoying reading it and finding that I can't anticipate what will happen as I usually do, which is a delight. I also love some of the dark ironies in the book's plot, and am morbidly fascinated with what will go wrong for each girl next. The writing also just has some interesting moments in a linguistic sense, when I just pause to re-read a sentence and enjoy the way it sounds or how it is written. The characters have an impressive amount of depth for having to split the book between three of them with rotating perspective chapters.

A fantasy YA book that I can't predict is a dream! Immediately starting the second book---so you know it's good. ( )

I think it's best going into this book not knowing much at all. I had kind of the same issue with this one as I did with Heartless. There's one main event that I was looking forward to and seeing what happens but of course that doesn't happen till the end and so until we got to that part, I felt things moved a little slow. It was a lot of build up, which I understand why but I just really wanted to get to the main event. The one downside was there were a lot of characters in here and it sometimes got confusing trying to keep straight who is on whose side and their relationship with each other. There was a twist at the end that I didn't expect and I loved it. I really enjoyed the ending and the surprises, can't wait to get to the next book. ( )

Abandoned after 50% read.

After reading literally half the book, I finally admitted to myself that I just don't care what happens. All three queens could die for all I care.

This book was incredibly slow and boring, overall. I also felt like Blake was trying to do too much with all of her characters - three unique protagonists, raised separately, so they also have their various mentors and close friends that we have to learn about. It was just difficult to try to keep these boring, indistinct characters straight.

And there are way too many sexual references for my taste - while the author wasn't overly descriptive, she was very suggestive. So unnecessary, especially in a book for teenagers.

There is quite a bit of language, including the name of God taken in vain. (Which is interesting, also, considering that in the book, the existence of gods are never mentioned, only goddesses. So why wouldn't the characters be saying, 'Oh my goddess,' instead?) ( )

This might be my new favorite book. It's everything I love in a fantasy, beautiful imagery, a little bit creepy and dangerous, snarky dialogue and animal familiars! I went in cold, hadn't read a summary (I do this a lot) and had no idea what to expect. From the beginning it was a frightening but compelling read. The stakes are high and every turned page had me wondering who would be first to die. It's stressful but also whimsical, which is a hard balance to strike. Even the supporting cast was compelling. I loved how the main characters were changed over the course of the story, and the twist at the end left me reeling! I eagerly await the sequel. ( )

Representation: N/A?
Trigger warnings: Blood depiction, animal attack, near-death experiences, poisoning
Score: Six points out of ten.
This review can also be found on The StoryGraph.

I picked this up from one of the two libraries I go to and I didn't know what to expect at first since this is the first book in a series and from an author I've never read from, I was sick and tired of realistic books so I switched to a fantasy, however I found like 90% of it underwhelming and tedious to read and the remaining 10% was at breakneck speed with so much action and a cliffhanger so where do I even begin? Did I mention this was nothing what I expected since I thought I was going to get a fight to the death instead nothing much happens at all. It starts with the main characters Mirabella, Katharine and Arsinoe and they are all queens living in the same collective place but different locations which I liked however the world building is just lacking since I had so many questions like how did these countries come to be, why is it that once every few hundred years two queens are born with such weak gifts and only one is born with a strong gift and she is called a White-Handed Queen and people call the year that happens a "Sacrificial Year" where the strong queen doesn't have to kill the other queens but then what is the Blue Queen then? So hard to wrap my head around. As I said before this was a slow burn because in the first 300 pages nothing much happens except the book telling me what is happening right now in Katharine, Mirabella and Arsinoe's lives and all the other characters as well, I had two main problems with this. First off none of them are developed or fleshed out and second off there are just too many of them, why do I have to keep track of every single minor character like Jules, Elizabeth, Bree, you get the idea. In the end there was a festival called a Gave Noir where someone must kill two queens but surprisingly all of them survive ending this on a cliffhanger. Wow. I'm not sure if I want to read from this series or from this author again. ( )