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Magical Girl meets fae weirdness with some magic boarding school thrown in for added fun. And I liked Amber for the most part. I don't know what she was thinking refusing the Seelie invite for as long as she did, but whatever. She's young and not that good at thinking things through (like the mechanic where magical girls get resources that would do her father much more good than the thrashing she's doing on her own).

So we see Amber learn about her time-based magicalness and make new friends and learn there are deeper secrets than people are talking about. She runs afoul of a magical conspiracy in her new school and that was about the right spice to keep the pace up as she attends classes and meets her assigned teammates.

The worldbuilding was interesting and the author kept even the lessons paced well and it doesn't hurt that Amber's team are individually interesting without breaking the sense that they could learn to work together usefully.

So I'll give this five stars for keeping my interested to the end. Where there is a cliffhanger*. So four stars when all's told.

A note about Chaste: The author plays around with potential crushes and there are some blushes and teasings. But nothing actually happens. It's mostly playing with the magical girl crush tropes that I had no idea were a thing until I read a couple of MG LitRPG stories recently.

* Cliffhangers and why they are evil: Cliffhangers are the ultimate disrespect to readers. They're an overt emotional manipulation to invest you in the next story by holding a metaphorical pistol to your head saying "you don't get a satisfying conclusion unless you read the next book, sucka!". Or, less hyperbolically, "I don't trust you to be interested in the next story unless I employ this emotional manipulation to ensure that you are." If you don't believe me that they are an active offense to readers, try this mental exercise: imagine for a moment that an author put a big star on the front of their story proclaiming "Contains Cliffhanger!" Would that make readers more or less likely to want to pick up that story? Right. That's all you really need to know about cliffhangers. Which is why cliffhangers are an automatic loss of at least one star.