4.5★
First book of 2023.
What a way to start a year! Yes. I needed seven months to sit with this book. Now, when I own it, I could definitely say, I feel obliged to read it again. Slower with bigger appreciation, because after the second part, I feel like I see what the author is doing. The book is balancing on the boarder of character/plot driven story. There is a complexity to each layer that is presented to us. Gideon as a character is charming and funny. Harrow supposed to be annoying, yet it seems that there is a genius method in her madness. The tournament that slowly and mysteriously supposed to establish the one who will later on be in the highest regards of the emperor, with power beyond imagining... yet the system is so confusing that I cannot tell it's a perfection to me. I understand it and at the same time if you ask me I would blabber and drool like a fool who never read a sentence in this book. Yes, that summarize it.