Rating: 1.5/5 
 (I received a copy of this book from the publisher, St. Martin's Press, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.) 
 ***Minor spoilers*** 
 After Mia's father was executed as a traitor and her mother taken prisoner, all Mia wants is revenge for what was taken from her. At ten years old she finds herself with a man named Mercurio, who agrees to train Mia so that she can eventually take revenge. Now sixteen years old, Mia sets out to train at the Red Church - a school for only the finest assassins who worship Niah, the night goddess. While Mercurio may wish to tell Mia more about the school he is bound not to, so Mia sets out alone in the hopes of finding this Church and training there. 
 I really didn't enjoy this book, which I found a bit surprising considering it had a lot of elements of books I've read before and enjoyed. The fact that only the top acolytes would get the best jobs reminded me of Dauntless initiation. Some of the acolytes were being picked off and murdered, which reminded me of the contest in Throne of Glass. The different classes and the worship reminded me of the school in Grave Mercy. I enjoyed all of these books and I probably would've enjoyed this book too, if it wasn't so long and boring. 
 I had been meaning to rate this book 1 star for the majority because of how bored I found myself all the time, but the last 15% of the book made me raise my rating a little bit. In that last 15% we finally got all the excitement, action, and betrayal I was hoping for. But I couldn't bring myself to raise the rating any more because of the first 80% or so. For such a long book with over 9000 kindle locations, I was hoping things would get exciting before I was 85% in and had already lost hope. While there was some action throughout the book it just wasn't that interesting to me, and it isn't the same when they're fighting within the school and it's most likely things will be stopped before they go too far. 
 Overall, I wasn't too impressed with this book. While the fantasy elements were certainly interesting, it couldn't make up for the boredom, especially when Mia's powers confused even herself. The action at the end of the book was good, but I already lost hope by that point. There were also little tidbits at the end of the chapters, bits of information or humour. Seeing as they were written like an encyclopedia I skipped the ones that didn't interest me, which was most of them. I wouldn't really recommend this book if you're looking for a good bloody fantasy novel, but if you're interested you can still request this book from Netgalley for a few more days: https://s2.netgalley.com/catalog/book...