I wanted to like this book. I really did. It has a fantastic cover, a great title, and it implied it was going to be about a badass librarian. I was hooked on that concept. Unfortunately, this story didn't deliver. It's not really about Dafne, the aforementioned librarian, and if there'd been a focus on her earlier in the book (or if the book had started later when she became more important to the story), I would've cared about her more. This story also should've been told in third person. It simply would've worked better, and I don't come across many stories where I feel that way being that I don't prefer a POV. It's author's choice, but first POV did nothing to help this story or build Dafne's character. 
 Ursula is the new queen, and this book picks up where the previous book in the series left off. The early parts of this book are chronicling Ursula and Harlan's more interesting adventures, and Dafne literally sits on the sidelines. This is why this didn't work well as a first person POV--Dafne tells someone else's story. That's massively boring. When the early part of the book doesn't involve the main character at all, I'm concerned. 
 It took 20% of the book before it felt like Dafne was the main character. The story should've just started there or else the earlier parts of the book needed to make Dafne important. She's a wall flower, and that's not interesting, even for an introverted character. There's a lot of characters talking about the plot and not a lot of plot. I felt like this story is about Ursula, which makes sense in the context of the series, but not for this book in particular. 
 The characters spend so much time talking about things. Less dialogue would've helped because there was too much of it. I know, there's this thing about not putting info dumps and unnecessary description into the story, but less dialogue would've tightened this narrative. But shouldn't characters be interacting? Yes, but when they prattle, all of the meaning in the dialogue is lost. The importance is gone, and all of the conversations felt meandering and useless. In the latter parts of the book, it becomes more descriptive and starts to rely on Dafne's internal narrative more, and that's the only reason this book became remotely bearable. This makes the early parts of this book baffling. It feels like an infinitely worse book and a completely different story! 
 King Nahoka KauPo and the descriptions of his people and traveling to the island relieved the amazing boredom of the earlier parts of this story. This happens a third of the way through, and if you can't get to this part, I honestly can't blame you. The first third of this book is DNF bad, but the volcano king's island focuses the world building and presents Dafne with definitive challenges. The bad news is that the remainder of the story leaves Dafne languishing on an Nahoka's island, which delivers the story back to some of the more monotonous elements of the earlier part of the novel. 
 The narrative voice of this novel (and the choice of 1st POV) grated on me the entire time. It was like sandpaper in my eyes. The positives of the book kept drowning in this problem, and no mistake, it was a huge problem for me. I already mentioned the drastic change in writing between the first part of the book and the latter part of the book, and I 'd honestly skip the first 100 pages if I were to start reading this all over again. 
 Read the full review at Throw This Book at Me