I wish I could give this a higher rating because I really love the reimagined Southeast Asian setting, and the use of song as magic. It's such a cool concept and it's well done. Kaiya is annoying but she's kinda meant to be, I think, but I really liked Tian, especially how different his thoughts were from the other characters. The author did a fantastic job differentiating thought styles, and I did overall enjoy this book, enough to move on and begin reading the next.

However, there's a big issue I have with it. The two main female characters, Kaiya and Jie, are both prepubescent in this book. Jie is older, but because of her elven blood, she's still a child, regardless of having lived longer, and both of them /look that way/, too. They are both clearly not adults, clearly not developed. This is important, because this is my big issue. Kaiya is lusted after, mainly for her position as princess, but so is Jie, who uses lust to gain information in multiple scenarios. This would be fine if they were not prepubescent. They haven't even entered puberty yet, either one (though Kaiya is apparently on the cusp), and yet there's grown men everywhere lusting after them. That's really really really gross. If the second book didn't take place a couple years later, I would not continue reading because I don't want to read pedophilia.

The last issue is with the epilogue parts. The story itself did a good job of showing, but the epilogue is very blatant and in your face cliche "This is the bad guy everyone" and it felt clumsy to me. This is a smaller issue for me, but it is there.