While I do have a major criticism that I'll touch upon in a bit, I really liked this book. I don't know much about horses, but I feel like many of the books I've read recently have involved horse-loving main characters and since I loved so many of Stiefvater's other books, I figured it was about time I gave this one a shot. 
 I've read a lot of complaints about how the actual race is only a handful of pages and a lot of comparisons of this to the Hunger Games. Mainly I've seen a lot of reviews say things like "The races only lasted 10 pages. Can you imagine the Hunger Games having 300 pages of setup and only 10 pages dedicated to the Games themselves?!" These two are not comparable stories and please don't let reviews like this keep you from reading the book! Yes, the race itself is 10 pages, but keep in mind time-wise, it only lasted 5 minutes! It was a horse race! The Hunger Games, on the other hand, lasted for a couple of weeks. I suppose Stiefvater could have had more than one race, some sort of bracket system, and the whole thing could've been drawn out more. But I wouldn't have liked the book nearly as much then. The race was neat, but I really enjoyed reading about the characters. The preparation, the finding of themselves, and the better understanding of the island and the horses was the real point of the book. It wasn't really about the race, despite the title. 
 I REALLY liked the romance. It was built up fairly gradually for it actually only occurring over a few weeks and it truly was built on respect. These two people saw each other as equals and partners, instead of falling instantly in love for shallow reasons. This is SUCH an important thing to show in a book. Especially a YA book. 
 Now my aforementioned complaint: I have a love/hate relationship with the fact that Puck rode Dove. At the beginning of the book I did struggle with the idea of Puck forming as strong an attachment with a capaill uisce as she had with Dove. But I knew that Puck would only win the race if she was riding a horse with whom she was strongly bonded. So initially I was ecstatic to see that bit of a problem would be completely swept aside: Puck would ride Dove! 
 But then the implications of that set in and these were only briefly touched upon towards the end of the book. The races really are about the capaill uisce. Everything that makes the Scorpio Races the Scorpio Races is the fact they're ridden on water horses. Why have them at all if that's taken away? It does, as one character points out, kind of sully all of the previous deaths if someone can just bypass the whole "riding a capaill uisce" thing. It makes the races less meaningful. I mean think of the races after this one: more and more people will try their hands on regular horses that aren't drawn to the sea. It will just turn into a regular horse race. I really just wish this was touched upon more. It seemed almost like a convenience thing on the part of the author to have Puck ride Dove instead of something that truly should have happened. :/ 
 I STILL LOVE THE BOOK THOUGH!!