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I wavered on the edge of just not finishing this book so many times. The hero is a misogynistic creep. Both characters are honestly pretty bland. And for a book about assassination, there's very little actual assassinations, or really any action at all, occurring.

Misha seeks out Rikki 18 years after saving her from the burning wreckage of her home after his mother assassinates her father. Since then, Misha's basically been in love with Rikki. I'm not sure exactly how old Rikki is, but after her father died, she was placed in government child care. Misha was in his twenties when he saved her. That's pedophilia right there. He goes out of his way to say that he wasn't interested in her during that time, but that she changed his life and he never went a day without thinking of her since... At one point in his internal monologue he asks:

What would their lives have been like if he had stayed with her in the hospital and refused to go with his mother, refused to go back to the Guild? Who would have been then?

I think it's pretty clear that makes you a sexual predator, Misha.

The romance between the 2 characters is insta-lust turned to insta-love pretty quickly. They go through a couple rounds of sex -> finding a reason to distrust the other -> sex -> more reasons to distrust, etc. Eventually, they foil a plot to kill the guild's director :shrug: Not really sure what Rikki got out of that, but okay.

The plot is pretty boring, not much to say about it. There are some pretty massive holes that were really hard to ignore. For instance, after Rikki escapes from the (space) cruiseship where she first encounters Misha, he needs to track her down because reasons. He monitors security footage to figure out what ship she gets onto at each port (since she's trying to shake him, she uses multiple routes to get to her final destination). So essentially, he's behind her the whole time and tracking her with video footage. Then, somehow manages to get to her final destination an ENTIRE WEEK ahead of her. That is some epic space-assassin magic.

Worse than the plot holes -- Misha is a complete asshole to Rikki the entire time. His initial reason for seeking her out is to convince her that she needs more assassin training; when she angrily tells him to fuck off, he's shocked that she's not grateful to him for the opportunity. He's condescending to every woman he encounters (calls his bff a trainwreck; tells his ex that he lost all passion for her 6-months into their 5-year relationship).

When he confronts Rikki about her missing memories (about how he saved her) and her memories start coming back, she's very naturally re-living her past trauma. And while she's doing that, he's downgrading his opinion of her to victim instead of competent assassin (even though he never thought she was competent...). I'm sitting here reading this like, I'm sorry, she can't be both things? Being a victim and having a natural emotional response to trauma means she can't be a competent badass assassin??

I could go on, but honestly, this book is not worth it.

This book was a retelling of Cinderella. That became clear pretty quickly. Alizeh is an orphan, working in a noble house in Setar, the capital of Ardunia. She is scrubbing the house by day, until her hands are literally in shreds, and by night she is working as a seamstress to try to make enough money to get herself out of her servitude.

Not a bad premise so far. There are a million retellings of Cinderella though.

Alizeh is also a Jinn, which means that she's got powers that humans (the Clay) don't have. But Alizeh is special. While most Jinn are "forged from fire" whatever that means, she has ice in her veins. Which means she's literally freezing all the time (...I feel like I can relate lol). She can literally sit in a fire, all of her clothes will burn away, but she won't burn. Plus she can heal super well but apparently despite her servitude for the last several years, only realizes it halfway through the book... AND Alizeh is haunted by the devil, Iblees. He whispers riddles to her, which causes her to fall into a state of terror for some reason. AND she's afraid of the dark. She's extra special.

Kamran is a prince. A whiny, spoiled, angry, judgemental heir-to-the-throne-that-he-doesn't-want. He's recently returned to Setar from fighting in a war against Tulan, even though apparently they aren't actually at war so I'm not really sure what he's been up to. His grandfather Zaal is currently the King. Kamran's father died 7 years prior.

But the time is coming where Kamran is going to have to choose a bride and provide an heir! Which of course he doesn't want to do because all women are boring ugly sycophants.

UNTIL he meets Alizeh.

The whole romance was pretty insta-love. They've literally only met three times before they're making out (and the first time they're in the same scene together, they don't even meet so it doesn't even count).

Honestly the whole book was so rushed. Everything is very surface-level. The author never really digs in deep to the world-building (which could have been really interesting!), or any of the characters. She just rushes plot point after plot point. And at the end the villain reveals the answers to all of the mysteries. None of which were remotely hinted at in the rest of the book. It's just Alizeh being sad and cold and broken and poor. And Kamran being angry and handsome.

Entertaining at times, perplexing at others.

At the start of the story, Sirantha Jax is "recovering" from a crash that killed her pilot and every other person aboard ship. She is a jumper, meaning that she has a special gene that allows her to navigate grimspace, essentially a faster than FTL method of navigating large distances in space. Being a jumper requires being metaphysically linked with a pilot, which usually results in a romantic connection as well. Jax is reeling from the loss of her pilot and the trauma of the crash, while her employers are forcing psych visits on her that are meant to break her, so they can pin the whole thing on her. It takes a while for Jax to come to that realization though.

Before she breaks, she's rescued by a grim, gruff man named March. He convinces her to leave with him and together they make it back to his ship, where the rest of his crew waits for her. They literally cannot leave without her, because their previous pilot and jumper are both dead, having died in the effort to retrieve Jax. She immediately takes the guilt of their deaths on herself and forces herself to jump with March as her new pilot, which feels like a betrayal to her previous pilot Kai.

From this escape, they pretty much jump from disaster to disaster, all the while Jax is taking every little bit of guilt she can gather from every interaction. This is around the time where I start to get pretty frustrated by Jax. She's literally making no decisions for herself; she is a passive crewmate that allows everyone else to make decisions for her and just goes with the flow. She asks zero questions about what her rescuers intentions are. Eventually we get a few answer, but Jax's passivity is incredibly frustrating, especially since she's our narrator for the entire story. It's all just happening around her.

In addition, she starts to take on a familiarity with the rest of the crew that is really difficult to believe, given that she's know them for all of a day or so? The timeline is pretty blurry, especially in the beginning. She starts to make comments about the other characters, like how "March is never not mean to her" which is a pretty big generalization when he really hasn't been mean to her at all and if anything, she's been pretty mean to him; not to mention that, again, she's been with him for about a day or two and that whole time they've been constantly running from things. She makes these sorts of generalizing comments about all of the characters, with very little basis to them.

The only relationship that feels remotely well-paced is the one between Jax and Dina. They start out pretty openly disliking each other, but the way their relationship evolves over time feels much more realistic than the rest of Jax's insta-connections, and I found myself really enjoying a lot of the banter between them.

The first time I really start to like Jax, and actually connect with her character, is when she says enough is enough and leaves the crew. She finally makes a decision for herself and actually voices an opinion of her own, and stands her ground! Granted it's 70% of the way through the book at this point, but it was nice to see her with some actual backbone. Obviously she eventually has to go back, and Doc makes sure that she does go back. But it's easier to accept her relationship with March when she does go back, because she's had time to process her trauma and her conflicting feelings about him after the loss of Kai.

The ending gets wrapped up pretty quickly after this. The foreshadowing from all the times where March warned Jax about his dark past is fulfilled when he decides to take a bunch of hostages and threaten to blow up an entire city when he thinks Jax is dead. Luckily Jax shows up just in time to talk him off the ledge, while her brand new bounty hunter friend releases recordings of Jax's innocence and the Corps' evil plans to the public, resulting in riots and rebellion across the galaxy.

Sure, sure sure sure.

In the end, I think this story wanted to be big and epic with some dark, scary, bad-ass characters. But it tried to do that without doing a lot of the work to make it believable. I had a hard time suspending my disbelief long enough to feel the things I think the author wanted me to feel. There were moments that I genuinely enjoyed, and I'm hoping that maybe the next books will improve on the story-telling enough to let me fully enjoy the story!