thank you to netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free ebook in exchange for an honest review! this has not affected my review in any way, all opinions are mine.

3.5/5, rounded up!

cassandra has extreme anxiety, ocd, and visions of death. she thinks that last bit is just a symptom when she finds out she’s a scryer with the power to see the future. and maybe, just maybe, she can change the deadly future she’s seen.

i wish i had liked this book just a little bit more than i had. i love the concept, and the portrayal of mental illness and ocd was both realistic and relevant to the story that was very well done. as a mythology and history buff, i loved all the references throughout the story.

the dialogue was...rough. it was probably the book’s weakest part for me. while i still enjoyed it, some of the conversations between collin and cass just felt incredibly inaccurate to how teenagers talk, and some of the slang made me cringe. i know teenager speak is notoriously hard to write, but o u c h some of this stuff was outdated in 2012. by the time i was halfway through, i was just used to it as an aspect of the book and it wasn’t as noticable, but i still wish the dialogue was a little smoother and realistic

and pacing wise, i think there could have been some improvement. as the first in a series with relatively intensive worldbuilding, there was a lot of exposition. at times that really slowed down the plot, and other times it wasn’t even exposition making things slow. other times, things went so fast that i had to go back and reread because i wasn’t sure where people ended up.

however, i did really like the characters (although i’m not sure i really bought into the romances) and their friendships. i’ll definitely be reading the upcoming books to see where this series goes, because i think it has a lot of potential!