I wanted to like this so much more than I did, particularly because I thought the author's voice was strong. Her characters and plot let me down, though. With an emotional goldmine to draw from (parents who raise a child and then discard her, and the child who was hidden for her own good and then rediscovers her family -- even though she was ripped from a loving environment), this book treated the human topics too simply. 
 The world felt strangly hollow, the characters props. The ease with which the wizard teacher let her student abandon her studies for weeks at a time bothered me as did the monologuing villain. 
 Three stars equals four stars for writing + two for everything else