After The Golden City gets brutally attacked, leaving most of the population dead, the new Queen commands the citizens to look for her niece, Princess Jessamine Gold, taken to the etreumain world as a result of the terrible war.

Jennifer Brown has a perfectly nice life, not considering the amount of time she spends overthinking about nightmares of a fictional city or a fictional tortured boy, of course. But when crazy things start happening, like the acquisition of some weird magic, a spy who tells her that her mother has been kidnapped by a dangerous woman, that the city of her dreams is real, oh, and that she is some kind of lost princess, she suddenly finds herself inside The Golden City, where the boy of her nightmares receives her holding a knife to her throat.

There, she discovers that lying is a must-survival-skill and when she realises that the lives of many people depend on whether or not she gets in the middle of a war of vengeance, she sets out on a suicidal mission, in which she'll have to figure out her identity before the city falls apart when the Queen's sister gets her hands on the most powerful object in the city.

A thought to keep in mind: Nothing is as it seems.