Er...this was something. I thought it had good bones to be really charming and funny -- the setup was tropey, sure, but tropes are fun, especially when some of them are turned around! But ultimately I thought the execution was pretty inconsistent and all over the place, and the tropes were not executed well. I also didn't really like Robert or Cerise, which didn't help the case either. 

Robert should have been endearing (I love underdogs), but instead he was a bit whiney and oblivious, and his obsession with being a valet really felt like it came out of nowhere and had no justification. Cerise had the potential to be an interesting, complex female character, but instead she was a mixture of girlboss and prim princess whenever it suited the occasion. It felt more like Cerise's character was a prim, old-school stereotypical princess who has these "unconventional" traits (knowing how to throw a rock and kill an animal to eat bc her dad taught her, picking up a sword sometimes, not fainting) that really only come into play when Beagle wants to make a point about how strong she is. There was not really any space to explore the complexity of both defying expecations within the prejudices of the world building and also defying readers' expectations by allowing her to be more than a girlboss, and letting her have weaknesses and complexity. What I felt like should have been a really significant moment for Cerise as a person (

when the majority of the 100 person company she organized and led gets killed even though she was advised to instruct them to turn back

), there was no meaningful examination of guilt and the weight of ruling. It's brushed aside, which was a huge shame.

This is what I mean when I say that the tropes felt like they were trying to be either satirical or subversive, but Beagle ends up just playing into all the tropes. Prince Reginald was the only main character whose tropes were handled sufficiently, but Robert and Princess Cerise's characters were deeply fumbled, in my opinion. 

Although I got the gist of what happened, I feel like there's a lot that was unanswered or brushed aside, and it really just felt incomplete and in need of polishing. 

How did Dahr come back to life? Why did Princess Cerise not know how to read and write but Robert's lower class sisters knew how? Why does Robert have these special powers?

The audiobook had some fun voices and narration, but I'll note that I felt like the audio mixing could have used a but if help -- sometimes the narrator got very quiet, and some characters voices came out quieter than others, so it became hard to hear without adjusting the volume. Thanks to Libro.fm for the complimentary copy, I listened on 1x speed.