This book had all the elements of a story that would hook me: a centuries-old heroine with powers from Chinese mythology, a broodingly handsome French elf secret agent, danger and family drama … but the writing felt so juvenile, it was really hard to get into it. The main characters giggled and bantered like awkward teenagers, not immensely powerful immortal beings, and the tell-don’t-show storytelling constantly spent paragraphs on the background and relationships between characters before falling flat on a meaningless and stilted exchange. The entire first two chapters kept making me wonder if I’d missed a much better prequel, since it has to do so much explaining. Other magical characters seemed thrown in as token representation, and the villains never got any dimension at all. I did finish the book and it did eventually get better, but the characters and their conversation were never as cool as they should have been, given their powers and their supposed lifespans.