This is CL Polk's debut work - historical fantasy set in a magical WWI-era alt-England with a murder mystery and closed-door MM romance. It starts the Kingston cycle, a trilogy of interconnected fantasies that each have a central romance with a different set of main characters, but one overarching class/political conflict. I really enjoyed this, though I would say the romance felt like it took more of a backseat than I had hoped and the world-building leaned info-dumpy at times. That said, this is a really concrete magic system and an intricately imagined world and Polk did a LOT of work creating the foundation for us in this book, so I look forward to seeing how this lends itself to compelling mysteries and adventures in books two and three (if I can manage to forgive our side character from book one who becomes a main character in book two - looking forward to this redemption arc, because I'm still pretty rage-y!). 

Also just have to give a shout-out to the on-page bicycle race with the villains - this was SO FUN and really memorable. 

Overall a good story. I'm left mildly unsatisfied by the ending and how it all shook out, it feels like it pulled punches to provide a "happy ending", something like how I felt at the end of Eat the Rich, in which the story wasn't necessarily bad but didn't really feel like a, for lack of a better word, "realistic" ending.

I am, however, brainrotten, and can only think about parallels between necromancer/cavalier relationships in The Locked Tomb series and the stormsinger/secondary relationships in this book. Fascinating!

This is an alternative history with hidden magic type of book. I really liked the atmosphere and the dual ways that magic was treated in societies. It had a nice little mystery and gave me a ship to care about, so really this was set up to be a book I was going to really love. For the most part I did really enjoy it. 

If it was unclear before, I have strong feelings about characters, and I loathed Grace. Did I knock an entire star off this book because of her? Yes, yes I did. Am I debating not continuing with the series because I don't want her to have a happily ever after? Yup. Jessica /might/ be able to convince me to read the second book, but only if the third book is amazing, otherwise this will live in my heart as a standalone.

Even with that all said, the actual main characters of Miles and Tristan were *chefs kiss* and I feel like this is one of those books that I'll end up rereading on a at least semi-regular basis.

Even though I'm not a fan of first person narration, I liked Polk's writing enough that I'm interested to check out other things that they publishes.