Really exciting and fun read! I’m looking forward to the sequel. 

At times it’s a bit brutal with the gore but I really enjoyed it. 

Zilan has a lot of quirky/sassy and downright rude people around her. Zilan herself is training to be an alchemist in spite of her father, whom she believes betrayed her and her mother. The story is good enough to keep you moving forward but there is some downright GORE in this book that I was not expecting or ready for when I started the book. The breaking and changing of monologues and internal thoughts really needed some help and I winded up having to re-read things several times to understand when the change happened. I would have rather had some break on the page or even just a new chapter to show there was a break. At one point you loose an entire day or two (I'm still not sure) and just pick up in the next timeframe with no warning.
 Once Zilan learns everything she can about her past, present and possible future for this book, it kinda of ends on a cliff hanger and.. I'm still not sure if I'll read the second at this point.

Loved it, the plot was so interesting and adventurous. 
I loved all the characters without exceptions. 
Zilan was such a great main character, I love how driven she was for alchemy (which she probably truly was the best) and for her family. I loved her personality and her relationships with her family and the Prince. I really liked that she was the « strong » one in the relationship while the Prince was the « sensible »one. 
And the Empress was an amazing villain who was a villain just for power and not cause of a trauma which I found to be a change and very cool. She was very charismatic and offered lots of shocks for the twists she gave. 
I’m still very shocked that at the moment the Prince is still dead ? Even if she’ll bring him back next book, I wasn’t expecting him to die or her not to bring him back immediately but props to her for thinking about her family first. I’m just really wondering what next book will be about cause there doesn’t seem to be a plot for it right now. Like apart from bringing back everyone I can’t see what it’ll be about. 

A morbidly dark young adult fantasy about the mysterious world of alchemy, set during an acient Chinese empire. Fan Zilan is a merchant girl from the poor South, who performs illegal resurrection alchemy, with the help of her cousins, so her family can afford to live. She has an unwavering desire to climb the ranks and become a royal alchemist, despite the bigoted hostility she faces because of her mixed heritage. But the more she pursues her dream, the more she discovers bone-chilling secrets about the royal court and herself.

Lee Baker's writing is graphically vivid and full of suspense as we read about Zilan constantly having to surmount the next obstacle that comes her way and deal with the many twists and turns that are thrown at her.

I believed in the close sibling-like yet fraught relationship between Zilan and her cousins, Wenshu and Yufei, who were both endearing characters to read about. And the shy romance that started to surface was an embracing relief from the relentless depictions of death and decay and rotting corpses, which became very stale the more I read.

I thought the ending was both strange in a way that didn't sit well with me, but also clever in it's unexpectedness. However, it did diminish the feeling of high stakes that the novel would've otherwise had. Overall, I liked the intensity of the story and how well it sets up the next book in the duology.

The writing was very good and the pacing of the plot exceptional. The story was quite gruesome and grim. The moral of the story got lost in the end.