This book wasn't boring. That's pretty much the highest praise I can give it.
So the viewpoint character is a 16-year-old girl pretending to be a 12-year-old boy. I do have to give the author credit, because the narrative voice ends up sounding like a 16-year-old boy--which works because of how deep she's pushed her female self into the back of her mind, or however you want to explain it. And a lot of the details of what's required for the masquerade (and a bunch of its ramifications) are well thought out and executed.
The reason for it is because she's trying to be a Dragoneye, and they're yet another magical society that doesn't accept females. If she's discovered as female, she'll be killed... or so we're told, and this comes up late in the book where she kind of has to let some people know and it should be all suspenseful because they might kill her--but it's not because it's not really set up properly. Last time this happened, the book at least included conversations among people who weren't [talking to] the main character about how women = shouldn't be in magical society. Here, I didn't have much reason not to think she was being unduly concerned. Which, guess what, she doesn't get killed for it. Sorry for spoiling.
The political stuff in this book was pretty watered down, as political stuff goes, but I suspect that that's because of its intended audience's age range. (Not too young--there's a lot of stuff that would go way over the head of kids--but not too old. Early teens, I'd say.) No, the focus was mostly on one specific guy as a villain... except he went too far into villainy, by my reckoning, for what happens at the end. I wouldn't be too bothered except I don't think the things he does that send him that far really serve any purpose except to make him seem evil. In other words, the author had him cross the Moral Event Horizon and then tried to pretend he hadn't. Or perhaps the author didn't consider him having crossed it yet... either way, something was not quite right.
I've pretty much already forgotten how it ends, and I don't think the sequel is out yet, so I doubt I'll ever read it.
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