This book was a lot of fun. It wasn’t perfect, and it’s not one I’m going to be thinking a lot about, but it’s absolutely great if you’re looking for turn-off-your-brain empty-calories reading.
The premise of this book, to start with, is that the Roman Empire never fell, and Londinium is the westernmost outpost of Roman power. Only the southeastern part of Britain is under Imperial rule; the rest of the island was able to throw off the Roman yoke thanks to the magic that the Britons can wield. They exist in a stable yet uneasy truce, with advanced Roman technology able to keep Londinium secure.
Our protagonist is Cassandra, daughter of one of Londinium’s elite, coming of age and soon to enter into her arranged marriage with the city’s most eligible bachelor. Her life is, by general consensus, more or less perfect - until, acting on an impulse she doesn’t really understand, she helps one of her classmates hide his illegal piece of tech before the city’s praetor’s can catch him with it. She gets swept up in a web of intrigue and romance, caught up in the machinations of Londinium’s elite and the native British kingdoms beyond the Imperial borders.
It sounds rather cliché, and if I’m being honest I played it up a bit in writing that. But as I said, this isn’t a book you read for anything groundbreaking - this is a book you read because it is pure fun. I got really, really invested in Cassandra really, really quickly. This was an extremely hard book to put down.
That being said, there were other things that annoyed me. The worldbuilding is something of a mess (over a millennium of alternate history and the West End is still not only a thing, but a theatre district?) and doesn’t really bear up to more than a cursory glance. The characters, especially the love interest Devyn, spend a lot of time holding the idiot ball. Cassandra, Devyn, and Cassandra’s fiancé Marcus are the only characters with any real depth. And the book ends on a cliffhanger, and I despise cliffhangers (fortunately I have book 2 already).
But despite all of that, I could. Not. Put. This. Down. And in the end, if a book leaves you wanting more, that’s a book worth reading.