The first half was a bit boring for me. I think it's mainly because many character arcs started off a bit stilted, but over the course of the book, we learn how important they are to the plot. Everything in this book has strong cause-and-effect connections, and the solutions to problems surprised me more than once, in a good way. I'll take a bit of credit for this somewhat chaotic beginning. However, the brutality of some scenes—the repetition—positively surprised me. The time travel motif really surprised me. Not just its presence, but its explanation. Besides the characters' theories about how they would work, the book suggests that changing the past won't change the future, which I really liked. I liked the lighthearted romantic threads that appeared, and there were more than enough of them for a book primarily about contemporary fantasy.