Oh my God! 
 Definitely 5 brilliant stars to Ms. Ward! 
 What a captivating start.. what a lovely setting.. and I mean, for a first book in a series, I'm already in LOVE!! It's not a typical one-hero show.. and maybe that's what drew me more to it!! I mean.. the whole thing was divided among 4 people to start with, and then it expanded to include more.. what I call now Jim's posse lol 
 I get why people gave it less than 5 stars.. it's definitely different from our BDB.. but still the kick-ass-awesome writing style of Ms. Ward is there. I worried that this was gonna sound like a BDB reincarnation.. but nope.. it's not. And yet, it somehow seemed familiar :) 
 A great start in my humble opinion. A marvelous start!