This one was hard to stay interested in and it might just be that I need to stop reading YA books. The dialogue and overall personalities of these characters was definitely on the TEEN side of teen/YA and I just cringed so much. The writing isn’t very deep and there’s little attempt at imagery to really get you into the scenes. I’m also not sure why there’s even romance involved in this one, as clearly the author doesn’t even like the MMCs. They’re both written from such a disdainful viewpoint that I felt sorry for them.
There’s really interesting blends of history with science fiction, and there’s no doubt Zetian is a little bad ass. But this just missed too many marks for me