SPOILERS AHEAD bc i'm too lazy to cut them right now. 
 kind of torn between 3 and 4 stars but i think i'm gonna go with 4. this book is really good but there is like a lot of teen angst [i mean it's pretty understandable, given the circumstances, but still] and also some of the characters make me so mad sometimes lol. basically i just love lada and the entirety of my thoughts on this book boils down to 'lada deserves better'. radu also deserves better, but i want to shake him sometimes and if forced to choose between him and lada i would pick lada all the way. also i just ...do not get why they are so obsessed w/ mehmed? i mean he's such a mary sue and he really doesn't treat either one of them very well, like he seems more like he is just using them than anything. i guess they probably just latched onto him bc he was the only one there that was even mildly nice to them but i still don't like him. also i didn't realize until reading the note at the end that lada was supposed to be a genderswapped version of vlad the impaler - i thought that was her dad and idek, i don't know much about him except the whole dracula inspiration thing. anyway i LOVED the ending to this book so i'm super excited for the next one.