Author: greysupremacy

Genre: Fantasy

What I liked about this book:

This book has some really fantastic worldbuilding. Chrim is its own special place that exists in parallel to our own, with its own rules and customs. Most of them are consistent with each other, and it takes a lot to make a world so rich without it stepping on itself.

I'm angry at several of the characters for doing things that are either stupid or flat-out evil, which is a good thing.

The characters themselves are also very well done. Normally there is nothing I hate more than shifting first-person point of view because very rarely do the characters have a varied enough voice for the book to not be confusing. This book accomplished that.

It was a very entertaining read.

What I did NOT like about this book:

This book does have some fairly significant structure and pacing issues. All the points of view are lovely, but they're muddying the plot. I still don't quite know what the watchers actually *do*, and it took until right up until the very end for there to be a war on.

There were parts of it that confused me because we'd suddenly jumped to a new setting without many clues to the readers, and bits and pieces of the story that just weren't explained well enough. I commented on many of these.

I think this story would be more effectively told if the author picked three or four of these points of view--maybe Cyril, Farren, Poppy, and Wren of the West--and ditched the others. They don't do as much for the narrative, and we'd have a lot more suspense that way.

I'd also, as much as I liked the narration, much prefer it if this book was written in third limited because it fits this sort of narrative structure better.

Overall:

This needs a rewrite but it's decent and entertaining. If you view it as a serial instead of a novel it's quite nice, but I wouldn't call it one cohesive book at this point.

Rating:

Narrative-wise, 6-7/10. But I give it a 8/10 for enjoyment factor.