Blog post: http://sonichreads.tumblr.com/post/16... 
 Review: This book had been one of my most anticipated books from last year, but did not get the chance to pick it up (because other books were priorities, of course). With lower expectation and love, I still bought the book, contemplating that the cover was beautiful. Even when I had low expectation, this book managed to disappoint me to the point where I almost hated it. 
 I'm going to start this off with what I found decent about this book. 
 And that is the LGBT romance. I cannot say for sure if the representation of it was accurate for other people, but I think that it is significant to state that the world was readily accepting this. There had been a surprise only because the two people were kissing each other, in my opinion, instead of a shock that these two females did it. 
 Although the LGBT romance was great, the process of how they were feeling or when they kissed did not make me swoon. And to be honest, that's partly because of the writing and plot because I lost interest in everything. 
 To start off, the writing was not the best. It dwelled on and on. I was really excited to read this, but at the same time lowered my expectation, the book fell flat for me. The writing bored me to the point where I wanted to dnf the book and I did stop reading half way through. I was putting too much effort into it and what I got disappointed me anyway, so what's the point? 
 Despite wanting to dnf this book, I skim-read it because I didn't want it to be a complete waste of money so I read on for the plot. Honestly, did the author put efforts into this book at all? The plot wasn't very well-executed. There was nothing special about it at all. It was predictable-- it had the regular assassination and investigation and suspicion which you could predict who stirred it up. I consistently dropped the book after each chapter and I was not happy. 
 The rest of the characters were flat and underdeveloped. Denna is the very girly and good etiquette princess whereas Mare (can authors stop naming their characters a horse?) is a badass-wannabe, I-don't-obey-rules kind of princess. And that's it?? 
 Overall: I wanted to like this book because the premise and cover were awesome, but it fell flat, unentertaining, and not properly done from its root.