I dnf this book, but I will skip to the next one because the flavor was good, just the world was confusing. For example:
- They are at war and have "front lines" that have existed for years, yet the ice kingdom doesn't appear to have any squads who've seen action.
- They have kingdoms of Wolves, with monarchies and aristocratic structures, but "lower" Wolves don't know about them enough to reveal them to witches when they're kidnapped and tortured to reveal the identities and locations of all the Wolves they know. So they live among humans. But, they have communities of just Wolves, and when a community is attacked, members of the royal family go running to show support and investigate, and they are recognized and respected.
- They apparently live lives insulated from humans, but live in mansions and towns and have all kinda of modern things like stilettos and air ships to drop into the Academy when it is attacked, and cars and more. How do they operate flying machines without filing flight plans? How do they get drivers licenses if they don't interact with humans? Supposedly, humans know nothing about them, so they don't have an "in" that smoothes the way for them. But Leia does fundraising for human charities, which is never talked about outside of the fact she does it. How is she so involved if they live outside of human society? How do they have money for anything?
- The shape-shifting was a curse bestowed by witches generations ago, and they are "dying out," but they have kingdoms worth of Wolves and people. The witches cursed entire kingdoms? And are now trying to wipe them out? They don't inter-breed with humans, so they've remained genetically diverse enough to remain healthy? That's a lot of people.
- She is forced to pick a mate at a ~3 hour event with hundreds of royal candidates (again, how do they have this many people??), after meeting a small percentage of them and no prep work as to who would be a good candidate or anything.
- The royal families seldom act like royalty and more.
I'm pretty sure what happened was the author said, "I want to write a story about royalty with arranged marriages. Ooh, and they're shapeshifters! He's a war hero, so he's strong with a past, and she's a do-gooder princess (who knows nothing about her own people's plights but goes around working to improve human communities in undisclosed ways), oh and let's have them be fated mates but they don't know it until later for drama, and we need a conflict no one sees coming... how about Wolves attacking Wolves because this fire prince wants to marry the princess so he can enslave humans? (BTW, they keep "trash" a.k.a. humans around in dungeons for training purposes, just a random factoid from the beginning of the book). Oh, and they need powers because who doesn't love magic? I could go on, but you get the idea.
Too many plot holes, the story and characters were inconsistent, and everything that happened was all just too convenient .
3 stars because it was actually pretty sweet, and the writing wasn't that bad. It felt coherent, but the glaring plotholes kept knocking me out of the story. I'll see if the next one got any better.