Mia Covere is only 10 years old when she is given her first lesson in death. Six years later, she takes her first steps towards keeping the promise she made on the day that she lost everything. But the chance to strike against such powerful enemies will be fleeting, so if she is to have her revenge, Mia must become a weapon without equal.

I have conflicted feelings about this book. It took me a good 150 pages to get into it and, after that finally happened, I mostly enjoyed reading it, but there were problems at every turn.

The fantasy genre is full of stories of young boys and girls training to be assassins (two of my favourites are The Name of the Wind by Philip Rothfuss and Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb) and Nevernight didn’t feel as though it had anything new to add. It borrows too heavily from books in the same genre to be truly unique.

Kristoff has a serious case of purple prose. He frequently uses convoluted similes and metaphors that made me want to put the book down and severely hindered my enjoyment of the story. The descriptions often didn’t make sense – ‘If her face were a puzzle, most would put it back in the box, unfinished’ – and Kristoff’s determination to make every scene overly dramatic only added to this problem.

It also felt a lot like cheating for Kristoff to include footnotes which often took up half the page detailing the history of the world the story takes place in. One of the hardest challenges for a fantasy writer is to avoid the dreaded info dump, and footnotes felt like a new way for Kristoff to do just that. More than anything they disrupted the rhythm of the story.

The world itself is interesting and definitely has potential, but the more I read the more it seemed that there was nothing magic couldn’t do. Want to look more beautiful? We have a spell for that. Mortally injured? A spell can fix that. Dead? We can bring you back with a spell. It became exasperating because, although the characters were in terrible danger, you knew it was going to turn out alright in the end.

There are parts of this book that I really liked. The city of Godsgrave is an intriguing setting I would have loved to see more of and the protagonist, Mia, is a compelling heroine hell-bent on revenge. I also enjoyed the political aspects of the novel, which were reminiscent of A Game of Thrones.

I’m undecided whether I will read the rest of this trilogy (the second book is due September 2017) but, either way, I won’t be in any hurry to do so.