Halfway through this book I thought it would be getting only 1 star because it began with the same ho-hum feeling that the other books had. To be honest, the only reason I bothered to read this or the second book is because I had purchased them already. If it had been a library book, I likely couldn't of been arsed to finish reading this series.

This book earned its second star at the tail end when it started to finally feel like the writing that had drawn me to Kate Elliott's work in the Crown of Stars series.

But too little too late - I just wasn't very impressed with this series. It was hard to read a lot of the world building because I just did not care about the main characters that lived in it. There was no sense of attachment. Characters were touched on and left for so long that I completely forgot some of them existed until their turn rolled around again. If only the rest of this series had been something akin to the last chapter of this last book.