The concept of women being marked with magical tattoos was something I hadn't come across before. I especially liked that the story was about a group of girls rescuing themselves from a life of fear and torture. The three protagonists, Aster, Clementine, and Violet, all have distinctly different personalities, and the character development that all of them undergo during the novel is sophisticated and intriguing. The novel follows themes of sisterhood, race, injustice, and adventure, and with the divisions being created in our world today this sort of writing goes a long way to explain to the youth in our society that we are always better working together, and that you can never truly understand someone's story or experience until you have lived it...The world-building in the novel was also totally engaging and never felt extraneous or ludicrous even though the universe in which it is set is so unlike our own...