I really wanted to love this book. The blurb made it sound amazing, and sci-fi's been a pretty reliable genre for me recently. And it was good, but it wasn't the brilliant I'd been hoping for. 
 It started well, lots of action and betrayal, characters I could root for. Rhee (Princess Rhiannon) was likeable and confident, bordering on arrogant, and the expected rude awakening shocked her into realising how little she actually knew. But she didn't really change over the course of the book. She stayed blinkered and rash, and her selfishness and stubbornness became irritating after a while. However, it's the first book in a duology and there were signs at the end of the book that she was beginning to learn from her mistakes. Alyosha, on the other hand, was dynamic, engaging and adorable. Not that he didn't make mistakes, but he had more depth and his decisions were more believable, plus he had a reasonable amount of character development, and tried not to make the same mistakes again. At times, I found myself rushing through Rhee's chapters to get back to Aly's. 
 Most of the side characters, unfortunately, were little more than ciphers, although I did like the way the alien-ness of some of the races were portrayed. The main villain had potential, with a nice line in propaganda and mind games, but got a little pantomime-y when action actually closed in on him at the end of the book. The sci-fi elements were well handled, the tech and its possibilities were intriguing and there was some real depth to the worldbuilding (I'm always a sucker for decent worldbuilding!) 
 Plot. Aly's plot worked. Even when it was going badly, he was making things happen rather than happening to him, and generally he was responsible for getting himself out again, with help coming where he'd earned it. Rhee's, on the other hand, ought to have worked but fell a bit flat - she seemed to be buffeted about between one event and the next, despite being a lot of talk about what she wanted to do. Too often she was rescued by other people, in ways that sometimes seemed a little too convenient. I also got a little fed up the longer it went without the two storylines joining up, which I expected to happen early on from the blurb (view spoiler)[but still hadn't by the end of the book (hide spoiler)], and there were a few incidents where something major happened off-page, and we were told about it afterwards, which felt like missed opportunities. (view spoiler)[ Vin's death? Shouldn't we have seen Aly react to that? And he was a good character, it would have had a lot more impact on the readers as well. (hide spoiler)] Also, a couple of the main plot twists? Saw them coming a mile off. 
 The romance was unnecessary, had hints of insta-love and inappropriate priorities (the unfortunate tendency of YA protagonists to be unable to think of anything but the fact the love interest just touched them, no matter what is going down around them) and developed far too quickly for my liking. 
 Overall, it was a fast paced, fun read and I'm going to continue the series, but it failed to quite live up to its potential.