This was a snooze fest. 

and I am SO tired of Mrs. Maas’s “…” and “—“ and “*italics*” please stop telling me how to read your book. There is no flow to the writing, my train of thought is interrupted by an ellipses every 5 seconds, and the emphasis is so far from how people actually talk. It’s driving me nuts. I excused it in the first two books because i liked the story, but there’s not enough substance in this one for me. 

If I didn’t know from friends that the 5th book is really good, I would have stopped reading at around the 350 page mark.