I would honestly give this a negative star if I could. The fact that this is catered toward YA readers for me is absolutely revolting.

Tedious and mediocre storytelling. The pacing was a complete slag. Some of the narrative itself was written relatively well, everything else in this book suffers.

Completely flat and one dimensional characters. Mary Sue main female character, a VERY special snowflake, with absolutely no explanation as to how her magic even works. She just speaks the words and somehow it happens. But she's so clumsy! And plain! And has super special magic powers! Where have we read this before…🙄

The entire magic system is honestly completely ridiculous. 

Emotionally absent and abusive love interest, with literally zero chemistry between the protagonists. He's a completely arrogant, entitled, abusive, narcissistic asshole for no apparent reason, other than the fact that he wants to be one.

'The Dragon' continuously insults her, berates her,  yet she she falls for him. Literally forces her to wear things she doesn't want to, she's sick and exhausted but he forces her to clean up her own vomit, and serve him without any instructions or help whatsoever. Se literally crawls on her hands and knees back up to her tower room. And he forced her to do this.

But she falls for him. Because "reasons".

He snarls and insult her, call her names, and then forces her to kiss him. The sex scene comes out of absolutely nowhere; it is so inappropriate and disturbing to the point I really wonder about this author's mental health.

Abuse is not romantic. I don't care how many authors try to make it sexy and romantic. It's not.

Overall, subpar. The magic and world building are far more interesting than any of the characters could ever dream of being, which is a shame because we don't get to see much of it. The premise was interesting, the plot was an actual plot, but it could have been fleshed out so much better if it only had a bit more time. The ending was a semi-refreshing subversion of the expected romance ending, but it felt a bit rushed. The romance part itself was, in my opinion, wholly unnecessary and a bit unpleasant. The main romantic interest is an immortal while our mc is... 17-ish. Not to mention the attempted rape scene.

The main plot of the book kept me glued to my ereader. It was tense and there were high stakes for the heroine throughout the entire story. And the heroine herself was plucky, brave and determined without coming off as stupid or purely reckless.

My main gripe is with what passed for romance it the story. The heroine and hero spent very little page time together overall, and most of that time he was being condescending and insulting everything from her looks, to her intelligence, to her magical ability. He was just an unpleasant character, even outside his interactions with the heroine, and only seemed to become even worse whenever he interacted with her.

As far as I’m concerned, the heroine had heaps more chemistry and depth of relationship with her childhood best friend, who was the other character I loved the most aside from the heroine. She was brave and selfless, and stayed at the heroine’s side helping and defending her with unending determination and bravery, and was always supportive of the heroine.

Overall I really enjoyed this book, from the story to the heroine and her best friend and their quest to defend their land and the people they love from some truly terrifying situations. Just don’t read this book expecting a romance (like I did) because you won’t find anything but a single non-graphic, awkward, rushed sex scene that was apparently supposed to represent the love between two character that spend most of the story acting like roommates at best, and antagonists at worst.

As you can tell by the 5 stars, I deeply enjoyed this book, though it took me a little while to settle into liking it. At first I thought the Dragon was just horrible and cruel and it was just going to be a story about how he makes people miserable, but it grew from there, though he stayed true to character. The growth in Agnieszka is believable and inspiring, and even when she gets stuck, she's not overly bleak, which I think helped balance some of the darker themes and characters in the story. I found the writing a bit stilted in places--the words just didn't come together for me, but it was only a few phrases in total that threw me, not enough to taint the delight.