I debated myself a lot on this 3.5 star rating, as I did really enjoy this novel and found the history to be very interesting, albeit very sad. But it is what I landed on due to two issues I had with the book that just took me away from it. The first issue I had was with the romance subplot between

Avery and Trent

. A lot of people probably would like this, but I personally felt it was quite forced and almost read like a Hallmark movie. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't a super fan of

Elliot

either, but I just think the romance part of things could've been left out.

Second was how Wingate got across the character's accents. I understood the choice, I really did, and I think this can really bring a story together when done well. But, with this, some of the additions and some of the taking things out made some dialogue hard to understand.

Again, as for the overall content of this novel, I really enjoyed it and I think this is a dark period of history that others should know about. I'm not entirely sure if I'm going to read the book's nonfiction companion piece, but I am seriously considering it. But I couldn't bring myself to give it a higher rating, unfortunately.