This book is not for people who are not already obsessed with the Ember in the Ashes Quartet. I hadn't read those books, and I assumed that because this was marketed as a book 1 this would be a good place to start with the world. It wasn't. It is entirely unwelcoming to someone who isn't already familiar with the worldbuilding and characters. It repeatedly left out important worldbuilding info and left me very confused.

I think that most of the people who are going to love this novel are the ones that are already in love with the characters from the previous books (as the glowing reviews here on Goodreads demonstrate). There's many characters from the first series that come back, and you get to see where they are now. For me, I felt like it was boring and annoying to have the flow of the story repeatedly interrupted by these obnoxious cut ins.

The new characters are likewise boring. A big part of this was the balance and pacing between them. We have three narrators, and are constantly switching between them. Just when I am slightly interested in one plotline, we are ripped away from it. By the time we made it back around, I had stopped caring about the character again.

Thanks to Netgalley and G.P. Putnam's Sons for a copy of this book. All opinions are my own.