4.5 stars. I liked this a lot. Grabbed me right off the bat and kept my interest. I liked and cared about the characters and, other than the romance angle (it was pretty easy to call that right off the bat), I wasn't sure where the story was going. I learned a little about birds along the way ...

I listened to the audio edition. Narrator was Lauren Ezzo, who I had heard before in the Hundredth Queen series. She really brought Ursa's young voice to life.

The part of the story I struggled with was the ... spoiler

Spoiler

little girl genius. I guess that just required a lot of suspension of disbelief. I'm not sure if that was more believable, that Ursa was SO smart and creative and functional at that young age, than the girl actually being an alien ;) ... which I think we ARE supposed to be left wondering just a bit.

One small critique on the writing, is the use of the word "said" ... it was said a LOT. I'm not sure if hearing it in audio made it more noticeable, but I was very aware of it throughout the book, especially with short sentences right after each other, for example ...

"That sounds nice,” Lacey said.
“But that’s more wishful thinking than reality,” Jo said.
“It’s not!” Ursa said

Just out of curiosity, I used the Kindle search function, and "said" was in the book 1000+ times. I looked up some of my other recent reads and "said" was in comparably sized books 60-300 or so. I found one with a count at 650 or so, but it was a longer book (500+pages). This would bring me out of the story at times, as I'd "edit" in my head, thinking about other words that could have been used to add some variety ... answered, cried, mumbled, whispered, commented, agreed, announced ... there are so many (and there were a lot of these used as well). There were still the times when just the quotes were used (when we knew who was speaking, so xxxx said wasn't required) so I'm not sure why there were still SO many "said"s all throughout ...