The beginning of this book hooked me, but around the first third, it seemed to drone on and not get to where it needed to be- excess scenes of monotony. Another huge issue with me was the vast amount of characters. As a writer, I'm good at keeping a list of characters firmly in my head at all times, but within this book, characters were introduced so rapidly that I had no idea who they were, if I should imprint them to memory, or just read right over them. After the first half, these characters were written as important when you'd never read about them previously to get a feel of the character. They were written without introduction, as if you should just know who they were and why they were important to the storyline. 
 My opinion, the book needed cut down- the first half of the book being within this current book, and then the Elite thread was introduced, which totally threw me off, this should have been in book 2 after we knew the who, what, where, and why of the series. 
 The writing is decent. The behavior seems slightly older than the characters' ages, though. I could go into great detail over why I gave the book three stars versus four or five... but I'd rather go spend some time within another story. 
 In a word... confusion. That is why I rated it 3 stars. 
 I will continue on with this series and read more from this author.