I enjoyed this book more the second time, when I didn't have totally wrong expectations, and knew the characters from Devil's Cub. However, I was still pretty disturbed by the classism and sexism that permeated the book-- not so much the characters' traits, which I can forgive as being historically accurate-- but the actual setting and substance of the novel supporting them. It helped when I pretended I was reading a fantasy novel where there was an outside chance that biology had actually produced different species of humanity.