Review Detail

Characters & Relationships: the thing that I most liked about this book is the complexity of its characters, they aren't any character that can be classified as just good or bad, all of them have shades to their self & unique personalities. Adelina is our main focus, despite the other POV's, give the more clear vision of this - despite doing some pretty bad stuff we always see her reasons for it, there isn't violence just for violence or bad decisions made just for some rushed reasoning, all the decisions Adelina takes are for a very deep reason and is what make her the person she becomes. Of course that with complex characters we have complex relationships friendships, romance & family all are painfully real and complicated, I can already see the heart ache that the next installment in this series will bring me.

World building & pace: The world building in this one is definitely one of my favorites, Marie Lu does that thing where she describes this world while narrating and you don't even feel like it's world building, you just start to imagine the descriptions in your head and BAM! when you realize you're already totally immersed in this new world. I have to say that I found this book rather slow, there is some action in it but I think most part of the time was spend on building the set for the rest of the series - which is awesome because this series has so much promises to become even greater.

Recommended to: lovers of fantasy, lovers of fantasy looking for a more dark setting/characters, readers that like complex characters & characters that are usually bad, readers that like to read about people with powers.