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512 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2016
So much life had been snuffed out while I slept without dreaming. While a stranger died beside me. So much death and destruction.Brilliant.
All because of me.
I was more than wild—I was a walking keg of gunpowder.Again, let me emphasize. I do not expect a heroine to be perfect. But neither do I expect them to be so frustratingly dumb that I wish I could enter the book and knock her out myself. Her powers are out of control - not an excuse. Kill her off or have her grow the fuck up. No excuse.
The only remedy was to be cold to them. Distant. Compassionless. Because any love I ever gave in this world only ended up destroying the very ones I cared about the most.THAT DOESN'T LAST LONG.
Tears slid down my cheeks. Too many expectations. Too many people to disappoint. Too many teeming emotions begging to be defined. I felt like a glass figurine skittering to the edge of a mantel in an earthquake. Any more of this and I would fall, break into a million pieces. “Make them stop,” I pleaded as I hung on to Anton, my words jumbled and scarcely audible. “I can’t . . . I can’t do this.”And she is completely fucking unprepared to be the Sovereign Auraseer, because she didn't really give a fuck about learning about her skills during training with her fellow Auraseers.
“Pull yourself together, child! Remember your training.”Cute. Not.
I wanted to weep. What training? While the other Auraseers at the convent had sat in the study hall and wrote essays on the subtle distinctions between hunger, avarice, and desire, I’d scribbled notes to Yuliya or used too much of my inkwell to play mind-numbing games of X’s and O’s.
His face was blurry through my watering eyes.The love triangle is terrible. The emperor and his younger brother. Bitter rivals. One dark, one light. I couldn't have made this more clichéd if I tried.
I didn’t let the tears fall until he grew bored of me.
The sun through the stained-glass window, which had made Anton appear so gilded and beautiful, had an equally mesmerizing, though much darker, effect upon Valko, as his face caught in a patch of unsettling crimson.There was no point to this book and no point to Sonya. There really was no reason for her to be at the palace, in my opinion. She can sense emotions! Whooo! Useless. What good is that when she can barely control her own emotions? Sonya spends the book being seduced by either brothers and that's it. The revolutionary plot, what little of it, didn't even factor into the majority of the book until the very end. It's like at the end, the author realized "oh, crap, there's no plot!" and tries to jam the rest of the book into a few chapters because there's a limited word count. No, thanks.
My aura pulsed with Valko’s in perfect synchronicity. I shared his aching desire, the urge to indulge in what we secretly wanted when so much of our feelings were restricted by our lives.
I spun around, my nightgown swishing at my ankles. “I did not come here for this!” I shook with rage. “He owns enough of me.” A sob broke through my words.
“Then don’t let him take more.” Anton’s jaw locked.
“How?” My palms pressed to my temples with desperation. “How can I deny the emperor?”
➮I was anxious
➮I was elated
➮I was devastated
➮I laughed
➮I gasped
➮I felt betrayed
➮I felt the angst
➮I felt the hurt
➮I felt the relief
➮My toes curled
➮My stomach knotted
But most importantly...
I reveled in every second of it
“Do you never take responsibility for your own emotions?” he asked.
“They far too often belong to someone else.”
I searched myself for some fragment of gratification that the once-senior Auraseer was gone, but all I found was my own self-loathing.Fucking GOOD! You should be loathing your despicable self for even attempting to excuse and derive gratification for killing someone, no matter how terrible she was to you.
My sorrow for leaving Ormina was one-sided.Are you kidding me right now? So the girl who HATED Ormina, thought of it as some sort of prison, never opened herself up to anyone, never took the help they offered her seriously, never made an attempt to stop feeling sorry for herself and make friends outside of Yuliya, all of a sudden feel SUCH PROFOUND SORROW for leaving this "dreaded place"? You sure that's not GUILT? And then expects the one who just lost 20 of her girls due to the mistake of one incompetent, unruly student to put her on a pedestral for being so brave and being drafted for something that was ALWAYS AN EXPECTATION FOR HER.
"Do you never take responsibility for your own emotions?" to Sonya.But then he became a lovesick idiot. No more rational Anton after that. :(