I don't want to be with someone who completes my soul; I want someone who will open it. I want to be able to choose. 
 This book was a pleasant surprise. I enjoyed the first book in the series enough, but felt it was simplistic overall. Everything in the first book felt...lacking in complexity; things were smooth, almost too smooth. She had pretty much one love interest, spent time daydreaming about Dante, her ONE TWOO WUV, she had good friends, and the Monitors were fairly antagonistic but by means was her life difficult. 
 It's not that I like things challenging for my main characters. I want to like my main characters; I don't want the queen bitch in the school making life a miserable, living hell for them every minute of every second of every day, but I'd like my protagonist to face a little bit of a challenge. It gives them character, it builds up their personality, their strength, and in this book, we see Renee grow a backbone. She stops swooning over the perfect Dante, she realizes that it's ok to be attracted to someone else, she feels guilt, she learns to defend herself against attacks from the odious Clementine. 
 Renee even learns to question Dante. She does not blindly accept that because she loves him, that he can do no wrong, that he may be someone different than whom she had believed him to be. She is not so blind to love that she does not see his faults or question his actions when things doesn't feel right. In the first book, she is blindly infatuated with Dante, in this one, she learns that love doesn't mean you need to blindly trust someone. Good for her. 
 I felt the mystery was well done here, too. The new Canadian setting is interesting, as was the flashbacks that gave us more insight into the background of the Monitors and the history of the schools. I wish that there were more details about the classes at the new school, and I wish that things weren't left on a cliffhanger at the end of the book. (It would also have been nice to get a nice confrontation with Clementine, too, but if wishes were horses, I'd have a ranch).