Oh, the bondage bit really annoyed me. I don't actually think he quite pulls off the male-writer-inside-female-protagonist balancing act, which is always tricky. The main character is a bit male-fantasy in construction at times, although a lot of that heavily-sexually-aware and rather fumblingly odd adolescent awareness in all the characters feels fairly real, particularly given the untold power they actually have. I just loved the classical mythology geek-out, and the way that the setting is (a) not explained, for good reason, and (b) functions as weird mix of eras as well as a perfectly straight-faced coexistence of magical and scientific paradigms.

The Shadow magical system is completely compelling, I loved it to bits. Poetry always had to have a higher purpose.