I was really excited for this book and it just really fell flat for me. The big mystery was so incredibly obvious and so it was annoying to watch Sigourney make the wrong choices. I really struggled at the beginning of this book with all the islands and how everything related to one another. Part of the issue is all the island names sound so similar because it's literally (Name) Helle. It's not immediately obvious that they're named after the family that runs the island. So I kept reading about all these different Helle's and I was getting everything mixed up. Once we finally meet more characters it's easier to realize, oh that's their last name and they live on that island.

A major issue I had with the book is that it just wasn't interesting. This is completely due to the way the author utilizes Sigourney's power. She has the ability to read people's minds and she can exhort some influence over their actions. When she reads other character's thoughts it just turns into pages and pages of info-dumps. There also was never any good transition between Sigourney's own thoughts and her delving into someone's thoughts and memories. The memories especially threw me off because they would be pages of scenes and no one thinks and recounts memories like that as they're just standing around. Thinking about plans and motivations makes sense but there were a lot of scenes where she just shifted through tons of complete memories. I also felt like the revenge plot amounted to nothing, Sigourney never really does anything to bring about her revenge once she's on the royal island. It's mostly just her reading everyone's thoughts and then doing nothing with the information she learns.

I did like the discussion surrounding Sigourney and how she was an outsider to the Fjern because of the color of her skin and an outsider to her own people because she is free and a member of the ruling class. She grows up in such a unique situation because her family was massacred as a child, there is no one else who can relate to her situation. She's all alone in the world with hatred surrounding her from both sides. I liked how her outsider status leads her to crave love and respect even when she knew there was no way she is going to get it. The Fjern will never like her because they can only ever see her as an islander who should have been a slave. Her own people could have rallied behind her had she not been trying so hard to be like the Fjern and act as they would have acted. Instead, she kept them enslaved and thus earned their hatred.

Characterwise there is no one I ever cared about. Sigourney was too unlikeable and while I can get behind an unlikeable character in some cases this just wasn't one of them. The rest of the characters just weren't developed enough. We only ever learn about characters through Sigourney reading their thoughts and sifting through their memories so I just never felt connected to any of them. The magic was interesting but never explained. People just randomly have powers, called kraft, and the kraft itself is random too. There are people who can speak to the dead and people who can cause pain with a glance and then there are others who's power is simply to sense the power in others.