I originally struggled to get into the book, though that was just perhaps the mood I was in. At the start it felt like everything was happening so fast and yet we weren't getting to know what was going on/who people were properly. Then I really started getting into it. The more Thorn got involved with her life away from the court you began to understand just who she was and why she avoided the court. The characters introduced at the begin could be understood more without them even being involved. The prince appeared to have very little involvement which usually I wouldn't like but I understood why in this. This book is a different kind of fantasy. It is one for the #metoo era, one for the women who have been hurt, and one that is able to make a fantasy world so real. Sometimes we forget how much happens in our world that could easily happen in the villainous worlds we often portray in books, but somehow we overlook the bad that happens in a book because it hasn't been written about. This book chooses to finally write about it. Write about it in a real way but at the distance of fantasy that we can understand and learn. Props to Intisar Khanani