I think Julie Dao is just quite frankly amazing, because as much as I loved her previous works, this one was even more incredible. I fell in love with it right away and was hooked from the very start. While is book is technically a companion book to the author's Rise of the Empress series, if you have not read that series it doesn't matter. This book is a wonderful stand alone. Lan and Bao are both fantastic characters. Despite this book not being overly long (about 300 pages or so), I really felt like I got to know the two main characters really well. Lan, especially, grew so much during the course of the story and I loved watching that transformation. I also really loved the magic aspect, which was done in a very interesting way.