Most fun with a book I've had in a long time. That's saying a lot, since I usually get through three or four books per week.

The protagonist is great. She's perfect for the modern taste: a sharp-witted, hilariously funny, cynical, mischievous teenage girl who gets sucked into one of those horrible destructive contests that (hopefully) only can happen in fantasy worlds and dystopian sci-fi. She and the other protagonist (the chief of the guards) play off each other extremely well. A relationship that starts off with her stealing his horse when he tries to kidnap her can only get better, right? More than the banter, though, as she's drawn into a world of wealth and privilege, she undergoes a moral awakening and begins to awaken the prince and the kingdom too. As you might expect from the blurb, there's a bit of "be true to yourself" as the guiding virtue and the way she resolves the curse. I was worried that this book would be some trite moralizing about that. But thankfully, it's not. That's not at all the moral awakening that she has. And even that hackneyed moral looks a bit less threadbare after you get through the rest of the story.

The minor characters are also interesting: the servant girl who becomes a friend, the apparent friend who turns out to have a rather different agenda, and the crown prince who is a useless dilettante but who wants to be more.

The main drawback to this story: when I got to the end, I was disappointed with the way the magic worked. It felt like it was just too convenient for the story, and different enough in its effects from other stories about magic that I felt it needed more buildup. (That's the "unexpected surprise" that other reviewers talk about that makes the ending less than predictable, and in my opinion, is really a defect.) ( )