Lucinda Price is charged for a crime she can barely even explain. After a fun night with a boy during summer camp, she kissed him - and he spontaneously combusted. Haunted constantly by her visions of lurking shadows, she is forced to spend the next year or so at Sword & Cross, an infamous prison-like boarding school, per court orders, and ends up bumping into someone strangely familiar: Daniel Grigori. Enigmatic and alluring, Luce can't help but instantly fall head-over-heels despite never having met him. But Daniel soon makes it clear that he doesn't want to be associated with Luce, frustrating her. Determined to unravel more about Daniel and his past, Luce ends up uncovering dangerous secrets surrounding the students at the school and realizes her attraction to Daniel isn't as simple as it seems.
I will be brief and completely honest: this book was bad. I randomly stumbled upon it online, decided to read it, and now I must say it was a waste of time. This book barely has any plot, yet the author manages to drag it to a length of 400-something pages, and almost all of it is Luce pining over Daniel whilst also being unkindly rejected by him several times. The way Daniel treated Luce for the first half of the story was infuriating, and at parts, I honestly started questioning why she was still in love with him. Luce's personality is incredibly bland and unlikeable, not to mention how much she just lacks a backbone. In fact, pretty much all the characters in this novel don't have any complexity and come off as caricatures of common archetypes. The grand twist towards the end was predictable and hinted at extensively throughout the novel, giving it no impact at all. And on a lesser note, there are also several jokes and remarks in the writing that weren't made in good taste and could potentially rub some people off the wrong way. Overall, this novel was unfortunately boring, and I could hardly finish the whole thing. I would never recommend it to anyone.