About a 100 pages in I was thinking of giving up on this, but I'm so glad I didn't. The basic premise (which I love) is that the druids (draoithe) in Ireland and their orders (of judge (druid), augur (ovate) and bards (bards!) have persisted in modern Ireland and across the Atlantic as secret organisations but with dwindling magic and power (actually the bards have died out completely) and are in a constant war (of attrition or otherwise) with each other After the creepily-compelling opening sequence, there was a lot of info-dumping and YA-romance cliche set-up that, amidst the very slow pacing, I couldn't be bothered with as I expected a simplistic adventure love-story to be what would follow. It wasn't, and there were twists that in my jaded, not-attentive reading early on I never saw coming, and the gut-wrenching and not-very-satisfactory-but-appropriately-open ending I am completely in love with Watson's sinister contemporised reimagining of history and folklore and psychological depth in storytelling. It made me think of The Wicker Man and The Owl Service rather than Holly Black or other magical secret society books for young people that we won't name... Big sense of the magic power of nature, but a nature that is red in tooth and claw.