I tried hard to like this, I really did. It actually pains me to give it a one star rating because I've enjoyed Neill's Chicagoland vampire series and I even read her YA Dark Elite novels. When I found out that she had started a new series, I was pretty excited and pretty confident that it would be a good read. I wasn't expecting epic stuff or amazing characters, just something decent that takes a day or two to read, much like the Merit novels. 
 Instead, 50 pages in, something just wasn't working, but I was so sure that it would get better, I powered through. Speed reading a page here or there became speed reading a few pages here and there, then about 150 pages in, finally realizing that I was actually forcing myself to read this book as if it's a literature assignment. 
 I guess maybe this just wasn't for me. I was so disengaged that it's hard for me to even go into specifics about why I actually made the decision not to power through the last 1/4 of the book - yes, this actually became one of the handful of DNFs, which is even crazier since I've read about 15 other books by the same author. The world building just didn't capture my interest and the main character, Claire, was so bleh. I felt like very little actually happened in the beginning - either that, or there was a lot of description that repeated the same information over and over again. The three things I can remember about the almost certain love interest and other main character is that 1) he was introduced in a paragraph that focused on how amazingly hot he was, 2) he has a sad background story about a dead sister that served as a bonding point with Claire, and 3) he has some kind of gigantic bed in his room. But I didn't care. 
 Oh, one other very minor thing that nevertheless really irritated me in the world building. To celebrate stuff, the people drink some mixed alcoholic drink (of whatever alcohol they happen to have) that they just call Drink. Yes, Neill literally capitalized Drink and made this into some kind of name. I found it incredibly cringeworthy to read whenever it was mentioned that people were drinking Drink or that there was a store that sold Drink. 
 Can you imagine us all buying Soda or having a glass of Wine with your main course of Fish and a side of Rice. 
 Instead of coming up with "fruit punch" we'd just call it Juice.