*Mild Spoilers Ahead* 
 I was really excited when I read the blurb for this book. I bought it a few days after it came out on my Nook - it was only 188 pages, which I thought was on the short side. It felt a bit longer than a normal novella, actually. 
 I really loved Ananna as a character. She was so honest, so real, so down-to-earth about the situations she found herself in. She focused on surviving and didn't have issues with doing a few sneaky things on the side to make sure it happened. There is one point, during the latter half of the novel, where she is offered quite a lot of money, and the power that comes with it, if she reveals the location of her friend, Naji. And she realistically thinks about all the benefits of what she could have if she were to accept this offer, but ultimately declines. So even though she did a lot of theiving and apparently pillaging growing up (as one might expect from being raised as a pirate), she still knows right from wrong and acts accordingly. 
 Naji. I always appreciate characters that start off as being very mysterious, very closed-off, and sort of open up in different ways as the story is told. I'm kind of a sucker for them, actually. And we definitely got to see many different sides of him. 
 This was one of those romances the progesses very slowly, and very subtly. Now that I think about it, I realized: there wasn't a kiss in the story. No kiss between the characters did I get. How irritating. Of course, I can forgive this easily because of the lack of love triangle in the book. Hopefully, one does not develop in The Pirate's Wish (sequel), because those two still have a lot of issues in their relationship to work out, and do not need the drama of some new face popping up and making trouble. 
 I can't quite decide how I feel about the world-building. On one hand, I still feel like I don't completely understand the Empire and the Confederacy and everything else. It's still a bit of a question mark in my mind. But I felt that the appropriate amount of information was given to me, as a reader, as Ananna moved around in it. I really didn't mind not having a completely solid idea of this world. Maybe because I was enjoying the characters too much to really care too much? Hmm. 
 I'm very glad I got around to reading The Asassin's Curse this year and very much look forward to The Pirate's Curse. There was a mean cliffhanger at the end, so now I have to wait a whole year to see about how those two go about doing those three impossible things. 
 4 stars.