I feel bad -- I wanted to like this book. I was so excited for this book. But it took me three tries to read this book and when I finally was able to get passed the first few chapters it still largely felt like homework to keep reading. I get what Bracken was going for - sometimes the war ends, but that doesn't mean peace is easily achieved. But the story still felt clunky and unnecessary. While I loved Zu in the main series - most of the other characters I loved were missing for some/all of the book. The new characters were fine, but didn't fill the void. Plus, the ending was SO RUSHED (if you can call it an ending at all - there was so much left unresolved). I would have loved to have everything that happened in the last 20 pages be the last third of the book. Instead it felt glossed over, a conclusion for the sake of an ending.