I started off enjoying this book. The first few chapters were intriguing, with an engaging main character, Genevieve is a thoughtful, serious, loyal girl, and I was looking forward to following her story. But pretty soon the story changed and became something that felt very like a first draft. Exposition, long, slow, repetitive exposition with patches of over-wrought description, and lashings of didactic allegorical preaching.

I'm not fond of the sci-fi / fantasy trope where entire worlds or entire peoples share characteristics - for example the hyper-masculine arians, and the hugely problematic faux arabian tribe with the evil sounding call to prayer who treat "their" women badly. I mean- how does that society work at all? How do the boys learn to speak, if the women aren't allowed to speak the men's language? I kept being pulled out of the story by the unbelievable world building.

The story uses my all time least favourite fantasy trope, that of the BIG SECRET that the hero / heroine must uncover, with everyone in the know being as cryptic and unhelpful as possible for no particular reason, and then treating the hero / heroine like an idiot for not knowing the things they never told them.

I'm not sure why I finished it, other than that I've run out of library books and had nothing else to read.