"I'm the puppet who holds the strings." 
 delightful. 
 Really liked this one!! 
 I swore it felt like waking up and falling asleep. Like protection and loneliness. 
 Why, you ask? 
 "Is that a trick question?" 
 "Every question is a trick question." 
 * A smart, strong heroine and a dashing, intelligent, snarky male protagonist. 
 * Political conflict and intrigue. 
 * forcing us to look at how we treat those that are different from us. 
 * Good writing. 
 * Mysterious pasts of our two main characters that get slowly revealed. 
 * A well-rounded plot that does not just revolve around romance 
 * ...but a lovely slow burn romance. 
 "The greatest courage a person can have is to love another, for there are only two outcomes. Either the love lasts, and our lives are compromised, or it doesn't, and our lives are emptied. Either way, we suffer more than we celebrate." 
 Briar was a pretty great main character, even though there were of course moments when I was like why is she doing this. 
 A princess is the bud of the flower, not the thorn. 
 "I am a princess. I cannot afford to be myself." 
 As a child, this life had taught me all the regal words I would need to rule. These days, I wondered about the honest words I'd never considered, the ones collecting in my throat." 
 The oppression of the "fools" was hard to bear witness to, and lovely that the author addressed this. I can't imagine what it really was like for those born with mental illnesses or intellectual deficits in such a different time (or world..) but Jaster managed to handle it with tasteful discretion. 
 "A fool is a man who believes glory can be found at the tip of a sword instead of on the tip of his tongue. That is life's cruel trick." 
 A testimony to how much I liked it was the book hangover I felt!