This book was exhausting to read.

It has an extremely convoluted plot and I had to concentrate carefully to avoid feeling confused. I couldn’t decide if I was loving it or irritated by it; I ended up feeling frustrated but found it fascinating too.

I suppose it earns 4 stars or even 5 for the author managing to put it all together at the end, and that was quite a feat, but my experience of reading it was just that I liked it, nothing more.

I think that too much happened and that there was too much action. The villains were too villainous for me and that would have been okay if they’d had smaller roles and were around much less frequently. (Voldemort in the Harry Potter series is very evil but he’s around on the page very little of the time compared to Harry & his friends & other more benign characters.)

I liked only 2 characters and had a really hard time figuring out most characters’ motivations, and even when they were made clear, the whole long plot still seemed too much to me; I think this story could have been told better if it had been slightly less complex; I don’t say that often.

I was ahead of the hero on quite a few happenings but I think that was a deliberate choice on the author’s part .

The prologue was really hard for me to get through but once I got to the rest of the book I found it interesting. The last ¼ of the book I was so curious about what was going to happen that it was hard to not skim through as quickly as possible but I managed to read as carefully as I needed to read.

I appreciated the historical fiction, especially the inclusion of some romantic poets. I liked the humor, especially one extended part toward the end. The time traveling was interesting and somewhat unique, but I didn’t like much of the rest of the magic. It was all a tad too dark for me.

I’ve rarely been both so satisfied and so unsatisfied with an ending.