Spoiler free: This was definitely the middle book of a trilogy, which makes it hard for me to evaluate it -- I hate not having the whole story available at once! But I spend a lot of time being irritated by the way the protagonist was so oblivious to the politics and machinations of everyone else. The things that impressed me in the first book were still here and I'm still very eager for the next book, but I think the choice of protagonist for this book was bad: the ignorance didn't create any suspense and the teenaged angst -- while was entirely realistic and (given the choice of protagonist) entirely inevitable -- felt like it wasted a lot of time.