The more I read of this book, the less I liked it.  At first, I was thinking I'd give it a 3, which lowered to a 2.5, which ultimately became a 2.  It was bad in a way that coaxes you to keep reading, but just gets worse and worse, like slowly boiling a frog in a pot.  By the time you realize, it's too late and you might as well just get it over with.  Reading the inside cover blurb had me intrigued, but I'd advise just fantasizing about how good the story could be without actually reading it.  The fantasy in your head is probably better.  While reading this book I constantly felt that I was not invested in a single character.  Usually, I get so immersed, but something about the way this was written had me almost completely indifferent to the outcome for everyone.    The present-day character is a basic-ass white lady with shitty taste in men, weird attachment/confidence issues (that you're given no backstory on, so of course I immediately assumed 'absentee father/daddy issues'), and a best friend she doesn't deserve.  She's a typical bad-boy lover, and even though the best friend and you as the reader can tell that this guy is a complete douche-nozzle, she is just hemming and hawwing over this absolute twat of a man.  He literally says fuckboy things like "Hey baby, I missed you."  But she's angsting so hard over him that she decides to leave the country, using research as an excuse to get away because she knows she'll just end up in his bed again because she is HELLA thirsty and has no respect for herself, and neither will you.  I get that this character needed her own "story", but this was so weak, and you just do. not. care.  At all.  I didn't care that she was sad and blubbing alone in a hotel room (LAWL), I didn't care when she met a new guy and was immediately wanting to hop on that, even though she keeps thinking to herself that he's not even very good looking (ah yes, a very likeable character trait, insulting people you barely know), and I didn't care about the fact that she cared about the harem girl Celia, who is the pivotal center of the book.  It doesn't help that she's a biased researcher, saying things like how she knows this girl escaped in the end, with absolutely no supporting evidence other than her "feelings."  Her friend points out how stupid that is and she gets snippy about it because she's dumb and doesn't want to admit that her friend is always right.  Not to mention the fact that she's probably crazy because she keeps hearing things, which I'm guessing was a very ham-fisted way of trying to build a "connection" with the main character in the present and the harem girl from the past.  It just makes the present-day character look even more unreliable, a hallucinating hot mess.  I feel that it wouldn't have been hard to do a few small things to make this character more likeable, but instead she's just self-centered and ready to throw herself at anyone who will jump in the sack with her and give her shallow compliments.  This woman needs a vibrator and a therapist, not a relationship.  And because she's unlikeable as a character, you don't care about what she's invested in, which means that the other half of the story is tainted from the beginning.

As far as the counterpart that takes place in the past:  It's a resounding "EH."  None of the characters were interesting enough for me to care, either.  They all have a sameness about them and it's so glaring that I really felt there was a wall between me and the characters.  Like if you were watching a play on mute.  You can see what's happening, but you don't feel any emotion.  There's this whole subplot surrounding who poisoned someone else, clumsy attempts at palace intrigue/spying, power struggle between the women in the harem, etc.  It sounds like good fun, but it falls completely flat.  Celia, the harem girl, is so gullible and careless about sneaking around that I actually felt satisfied when she eventually gets caught.  You could see it coming from a mile away.  Pretty much the only redeeming quality were some of the historical facts that are presented throughout the book.  It's kind of savage to say that the nonfiction aspects were more interesting than the actual fiction of the novel, but there it is.

As a little aside, this author was so obsessed with the word ~*vertiginous*~, that I never want to see it again, lest my eyes forcibly remove themselves from their sockets.  It's not a commonly used word in the first place (as in, I don't recall ever having seen it in another book, ever), which made it stand out even more, which made it even more annoying whenever it popped up.  When an uncommon descriptive word gets repeated four or five times in your book, I think it's time to crack open a thesaurus.  There's also a line that pops up so many times that it's possibly even more annoying.  "He trifles with your heart."  The author is self-aware enough to have the main character make fun of the old-fashioned wording, but that doesn't stop her from using the same line 6-9 different times.  Reiterating to your audience like they're children about why they should care about your unlikeable main character still isn't going to make them care anymore than the first time you said it.