This book is so incredibly close to being a full 5 stars. I WANT it to be a full 5 stars. Pretend that 4 is in reality a 4.9 because this book is really REALLY good. But for reasons I will explain later, I feel that there was one flaw in it (at least for me) that keeps nagging at me, refusing to give it the full 5 stars. 
 Firstly, the overall idea of this book is brilliant. There is this group of people called "poets" who, like their name suggests, have the power over words. But not so much in the "shall I compare thee to a summer's day" sense and more of the sense that, when uttering the right combination of syllables, they can control other people and make them do pretty much anything. That premise alone got me hooked. The book follows two differing story lines, one following Emily Ruff, a young girl brought into the poets and following her journey within the organization, and the other following two men, one of who is kidnapped by the other, presumably for his own safety. 
 Before I get into the one issue I have with the book, I would like to point out how great the characters are. Particularly Emily and Eliot, our two leads. They are extremely well characterized and I invested to a fault in what was happening in their stories. 
 Which brings us to my problem. 
 Pacing. (and time jumps) 
 I'm going to delve a little into spoilers here so before I do, here's the short version: the book felt rushed for me, and multiple flashbacks and flashforwards made it very confusing. Also, from a personal experience, until story A intertwined with story B, I was significantly less invested in story B than I was story A and, due to my own method of reading, missed some details because I just wanting to get back to story A and wasn't giving story B my full attention. 
 I appreciate the intent in which the decision to make this story non-linear was made. I don't want to sit here bemoaning attempts to be innovative with writing by not following the standard "exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution" formula. But as I kept reading the book, I felt myself continually becoming disoriented at what was happening and when in the timeline of the novel it was occurring. And to be fair, a good number of the twists simply could not work in a linear fashion. So I don't have a solution, as it were, that would resolve my disorientation and/or confusion along with keeping the fidelity of the plot twists in tact. But multiple times a time jump either forward or backwards occurred and I didn't realize it until an impossibility happened, such as a character who in present day is dead suddenly showing up. 
 The other issue for me was pacing. I am aware that I read VERY fast, and compounded on my own inability maintain my focus when the story shifts from characters I'm extremely invested in to ones that I'm not, this pacing problem might be partially my own fault. Multiple times I realized I wasn't paying as strict attention to what was happening with Eliot and Wil (especially before the one major twist involving them) because I so desperately wanted to get back to Emily and what was happening in her story. But overall I felt that this book could have benefited from being stretched out a bit more, letting the characters breathe and react to all the craziness happening around them. When I have 20 pages left in the book and start thinking "I honestly don't know how we're going to resolve this in the time allowed" I think that's a sign of a pacing problem. To be fair, it was for the most part resolved. A little hastily I would argue, but resolved it was. I just would have liked to explore that ending a bit more and how the characters dealt with all of that trauma. 
 Those two problems aside, this was an excellent book. I definitely will be rereading it in the future, if only because I need to make sure my assessment of the pacing wasn't just rushed reading on my part. But it won't be a painful or arduous reread in any sense.