I find the writing style really strange and the odd hyphenation of words rather distracting - 'af-fairs', 'in-spired', 'impa-tience'. I appreciate this may be because it's an ARC but why take the chance this could be in the finished copy and will continue to annoy you? In addition, a character is described as being happy and then the next sentence reads '"Happy," we should say with an asterisk.' Inverted commas, surely?