In soccer commentary, there is a classic terribly overused cliche that when one team is dominant for one half and the other is dominant the other, it's been a "game of two halves." Usually you can't divide books so neatly in half, but in this case I spent the first half of the book attempting to figure out how I would have restructured it to actually make it compelling and engaging, and then the second half I was hooting and hollering. So! A book of two halves it is.
This is a story about Will, an orphan in early 19th century London whose mom died trying to protect him from evil doers and who discovers a secret magical underbelly to the whole society and blah blah blah you have probably read a YA fantasy before. That's part of the problem with the start of this story: it's extremely derivative and yet it also has pages and pages of exposition to get the reader through, but I can't say that I ever felt grounded in the setting. This is partly because the secret magic brings him to a hidden place that's out of time, since the Stewards (a secret society and a name I cannot keep in my head for longer than two minutes) has been training to prevent the rebirth of the Dark King for ages, so they feel much more King Arthurish than Regency, to say the least. The first two hundred pages has about ten pages of actually interesting stuff, and then it quickly shifts away to explain how good the good guys are, but when it's revealed that actually they've been doing some pretty questionable stuff in the name of being good, actually!, it's not really a surprise because we have no investment in the good guys. So up until this point: basically a C! Not something I'd want to read a second novel of!
However. We then arrive at the kidnapping of the most perfect and powerful and (most importantly) beautiful blond twink that Will has ever seen, for super honorable reasons we swear, and suddenly the whole thing kicks off and the second half of the book is a jam. I can't say that the book is particularly surprising--I started texting friends who had read it with predictions and I was pretty dark accurate--but I don't mind that at all, and certain scenes did make me honk like a goose. So! If you're willing to skim your way through 200 pages of setup to get to the actual emotional heart of a story at the beginning of a trilogy, I highly recommend this, and that especially goes if you've read the Captive Prince trilogy and know the kind of tropes this author is into. If you're wondering if that still applies to this, boy howdy does it.
Grade: (C + A)/2 = B
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