What a beautiful cover. What a promising blurb. What a disaster it all turned out to be... 
 Freya hates court life. We only know this because she claims everyone there hates her and makes fun of her; we never see evidence. However, there is one person who actually likes Freya, her bestie for life, who is (surprise!) the outspoken one in the relationship and is never expanded on, never given a personality. In fact, she vanishes for long periods of time and supposedly does nothing while off screen. 
 During the king's birthday feast, Freya has a brilliant idea for a science project thanks to her hair clip and she disappears before the final course. The next day, she's informed nearly the entire court is dead from poison and she's now queen. 
 I didn't care that this followed the usual YA tropes, I didn't even care when the killer revealed themselves (unintentionally) halfway through. My biggest complaint with this book is that it's a snooze fest. It's boring. Nothing happens. Freya becomes queen and then... she walks around. A lot. She walks here, she walks there, and sometimes she walks outside of the palace, but mostly she's just wandering around. I can't tell you a single plot point from the first half. 
 The second half is dominated by the looming threat of civil war. Oh wait, no, there's no fighting in this book. There was a scuffle at some point in the throne room and I couldn't tell you what actually happened. All Freya tells us is that maybe people were swinging swords, maybe there was a little bit of blood. Who really knows? There's no action in this book. Ever. There's no peak in the plot, no excitement, no build-up to anything. 
 I thought Freya's dealing with the adults around her extremely annoying. She basically plugged her ears and said "All adults are dumb; disregard them." Girlfriend, you don't know the first thing about being queen, what it takes, what you have to do, and these people have held council for how many years? But Freya insists she can do everything on her own, including searching for the one who poisoned the old court. She's super special because she knows about science and no one else does. Especially not any dumb adults. Could you imagine if more than one girl knew about science? NO ONE ELSE UNDERSTANDS SCIENCE EXCEPT FOR MAGNIFICENT FREYA. But I will, as I do with all YA books, give kudos to no absentee parents. Freya's dad sticks around and plays a role. So there's that, I guess.