This book made me really sad. The premise was interesting. I mean it is about an assassin school where the students are not guaranteed to survive their training. I should have loved this. Yet, the writing was so obtuse and unreadable for almost 50% of the novel that it felt like a chore to finish the novel. The writing got in the way of the telling of the story. Plus, as many other reviewers have pointed out, there were metaphors and similes that made NO SENSE whatsoever. I get that it is attempting to be poetic, but the use of the literary devices should add to, not detract from, the telling of the story. It seems like most of the clumsy writing and weird metaphors/similes disappeared in the latter portion of the novel, but I can't tell if I just got use to them being present. 
 Plus the form the novel was written in was hard to follow. Italics denote what happened in the past, which is fine, but the way it was placed together felt like it was set up to deliberately confuse the reader. It also made the characters feel really distant for the entirety of the novel, like there was a plane of glass between the reader and them. Like people die, and I should care, but I don't. I mostly kept reading because I wanted to see how the plot wrapped up. 
 Overall, I was disappointed with the execution of the story. It could have been so good, if the writing and the characters had not gotten in the way of the story itself.