The concept of this book was what grabbed my interest - the three sisters with no choice but to fight each other to the death. I expected a dark, tense, thrilling story. 
 I didn't get it. 
 That's not to say it was a bad book. There was a lot I liked about it. The characters, the worldbuilding, the intrigue. The romance(s), both those realised in this book and the ones I think might be potentials for the rest of the series, were nicely understated, and left in a position where they could build in the next book and it's not obvious where they'll end up. With very few exceptions, I've got no idea which characters to trust (that's a good thing. Trust me.) 
 But. 
 The tone of the writing just didn't seem to fit the storyline. It didn't deliver the sense of menace I wanted, it was too light, almost superficial. The first third of the book was spent alternating between the sisters while not a lot happened, to be honest, while they made new friends and met potential love interests and worried about things. If the characters had been less likeable, I might have given up on the book before the first real action happened. 
 When things did start happening, the pace of the book picked up but I still found chunks of it to be boring. Not because the storyline was boring, but because the writing failed to grab me. Some of the action scenes felt like we were skimming over the surface of them instead of really feeling the danger, fear, whatever it happened to be, and others I was just confused about what on earth was going on. 
 There were too many characters to get a handle on a lot of them, and it really didn't help that we got so many different points of view. Not only each sister, but various of their "courts" - friend and enemy. They shifted so often from one to the other within each court, it was like hopping between different heads. With the slightly distant writing style as well, it was sometimes hard to tell who's point of view I was reading for a particular scene. I think it would have been much better - and upped the tension, made the story more gripping - to slim down the viewpoints so the readers didn't know so much about what all the different players were thinking. It also made certain parts of the plot (view spoiler)[ particularly what happened with Katharine and Pietyr (hide spoiler)] feel a bit like cheating - how could we have been in that character's head so often without getting a hint of what he was up to? Or even that he was up to anything at all! 
 Overall, it was a quick read and had enough good points that I'll probably get the next in the series to find out what happens, but it's not going to be one of my favourites.