I got this book thinking of a fast paced, thrilling adventure with a rocking heroine main character who is a necromancer and is sent to spy on another country were assassins are breaking havoc and she is there to help them. Well…that wasn’t quite what I got.

I barely got to know or care about Isyllt, the “heroine”. Her traveling companions Adam and Xinai were just that, traveling companions. Though Xinai does get more story time because she is from Symir and gets deeply involved with her homeland’s revolution.The plot unfolded slowly and while interesting in the end, at times it failed to completely grab my spaz-y attention. The names were quite hard to remember and match them to the characters. They all sounded too foreign and hard for me to remember easily, even the main characters. There are a lot of made up words and no glossary for reference, which again made it hard to keep everything in order. By the third part and last of the novel I was only half hooked on the story and still wanted to know more about the characters.

That being said I found the descriptions beautifully done; I could really imagine the city of Symir with all the water canals, the humid rainforest atmosphere and the river. The characters personalities ARE interesting and you WANT to get to know them, but you just don’t. The characters have a good ‘structure’, they just need to be fleshed out so that the reader can connect with them.

I’ll definitely continue the series and read The Bone Palace just because I want to know more about Isyllt and her necromancer powers, Asheris (her newly found hot djinn friend), and Kiril, (her ex-lover and boss who only gets mentioned in this first book).