From the very first introduction of our dark brooding mysterious love interestTM, I really wasn't sure I could handle this book ("His hair, the near-black of damp earth, was swept back into a bun at the nape of his neck. / He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen."). And it went on much the same, with the little interesting court intrigue and character development lost in a sea of YA tropes and ridiculously over-the-top romance. And a magic system that is so soft, people just Do Things and magic Happens and I did not get it. (Someone is very ill and dying of a presumably magic malady that is never explained, too.)

The main characters are 18, which makes the fact that she is a renowned seamstress and he has been in exile for four years to recover from an alcohol problem really odd. I don't understand why all fantasy love interests are either teenagers or a thousand years old. Is it because thirty-year-olds just aren't attractive enough?

That is not to say I did not enjoy reading it: this the first novel I've finished in quite a while. I started it at 12:30 am last night and finished at 2 pm. Sometimes, I just want to read a ridiculous novel.

Content warning: despite the YA tropes, this book is adult in terms of sexual content (a few skippable chapters/scenes, references dropped throughout). I did not know this before reading and assumed it was a YA novel. This sort of thing always throws me off in books where the characters are teens. I wish, if authors wanted to write books with sexual content, they would make their characters older. As it is, this sort of book will be read by teens who absolutely should not be reading them, and by adults who will live vicariously through teenagers having sex, and both of those things are bad.