My original review/response upon finishing this book was: 
 "This was either a two or a three star book for me... probably not a four... ??? Clearly I need to sleep on it and revise at a later date after I've figured out what just happened. (What just happened?)" 
 At the time I gave it 3 stars, but I think I'm going with 2 for now instead. 
 So... I LIKE Rosamund Hodge, and there are some interesting concepts running amok in this book, so I want to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume the second book will pull everything together brilliantly... I'm just... not sure this duology format is working out all that well for her so far. The loose ends here have tangled up my brain. 
 This book starts out as a Romeo and Juliet retelling, but the majority of the plotline of Shakespeare's play is actually backstory (there are bits of it in flashbacks). We jump in near the end, at which point everything basically goes out the window when an attempted act of magic goes terribly awry and it gets very hard to tell exactly who's living and who's dead and what that even means. Romeo and the Juliet (it's a title, though used like a name) are separated, and the main protagonists of the novel are actually the two people to whom each of them ends up accidentally bound: Romeo with Paris and Juliet with Runajo (based on Rosaline, an offstage character in the play). 
 All the while the world is totally ending from a magical un-dead apocalypse event. All that remains of humanity has retreated to the island of Viyara, where the Sisters of Thorn have got a magical shield going that requires blood and human sacrifice (eep). There are the Old Viyarans here, but also two clans with totally different cultures that arrived in large numbers (The Catresou are the "Capulets" and the Mahayani are the "Montagues"), as well as a hodge-podge of others, and co-existence is tenuous. Everyone has different religious beliefs, ideological systems, relationships with magic, and ideas about the afterlife, and I didn't feel like I got enough time with each of them to make sense of it all. In Hodge's previous books, I really enjoyed seeing how she took inspiration from real-world religious mythologies to craft her fantasy-world magic and social structures, but I honestly haven't figured out what all the real-world influences might be here, so I'm sort of at a loss. In terms of the magic (especially that practiced by the Sisters), I was reminded very strongly of Garth Nix's Old Kingdom books. It's clear to me that Nix is a huge influence, which is fine, but it didn't sit so well with me given that I only recently felt disappointed and burned-out by Abhorsen. 
 Runajo (a young Sister of Thorn) is a very recognizable Rosamund Hodge style heroine. She's jaded, determined, and self-sacrificial, on a personal mission to save the world because it doesn't seem like anyone else is going to. Paris is actually a pretty refreshing character to balance the story out, even if I struggled to keep up with his wild adventures about town with Romeo. There are a few brief quotes and things that I recognized from other Shakespeare plays, and then eventually there's a side character introduced who seems to come from a different play as well. I don't know if we'll get more Shakespeare mash-up in the second book, but I kind of hope so. 
 The thing is, I think that if you had stopped me in the middle of either of Hodge's standalone novels and told me I had to wait for the second half, I'd have been just as perplexed as I am here, and each of those stories eventually wrapped up in a way that I found completely satisfactory. But I honestly don't think that I'll be able to retain most of the relevant information from this book without more of a conclusion than we get. I'm afraid I'll have to re-read this one before book 2, and I just don't want to do that. 
 Some things I selfishly want from the second book: 
 Obviously the two plot lines will need to converge. 
 Perhaps more importantly, the various religious/magical/afterlife ideologies will need to converge as well. 
 Personified Death as a character??? 
 I'm hoping against hope this doesn't devolve into endless magical un-dead carnage. 
 Twelfth Night, please. I'm a sucker for Twelfth Night. 
 An explanation for the random feral cat infestation. This needs to be explained. 
 I think the world will need to be saved too, but that's honestly the least of my concerns right now.