I flew through this book to try to finish it before attending my first book club here and I really enjoyed it. At first, I thought it would be an adult version of Caraval, so I thought perhaps I would hate it, but I found myself invested in the competition and Blackwell and really enjoying it. I was vibing on like 4.5 feelings when I first closed the book. 

I personally think the prologue shouldn’t have been there, but I’m the only person in the book club who seemed to have known the *thing* that was revealed as a surprise later so maybe it wasn’t as obvious as it felt to me. 

I absolutely enjoyed the romance and I loved that all of the levels were explained/explored instead of glossed over. I got the sense each time that the competition was hard and not something that was easy even for the ones who “won” the levels first. 

I thought the ended felt extremely rushed and anticlimactic. There weren’t many pages left and I wasn’t sure how all of it would get resolved, but there was a ton of reveals and weird coincidences and I rolled with it until the next day when I had make time to mull it over and I feel like none of it made sense. The second book involves the sister, so I wasn’t originally going to read it because I didn’t like her, but I’m half tempted to read it just to see if more of the rushed ending is explained and explored further. 

Overall, it was a fun, sexy, and adventurous book that I’m glad I read.