Tamsyn Muir

Man I dunno that kind of just never got off the ground. just felt like a slog and uninteresting and all the mysteries weren't set up enough and were resolved in baffling ways. lots of high fantasy melodrama that gets punctured by deeply unfunny snarky remarks. An ending which is a really long unfollowable action sequence. The lesbianess of it was barely developed and felt unearned and laughable and also just sucked in terms of weird power dynamics - like it felt like I was reading references to fanfiction tropes as if briefly running a checklist could substitute for actual emotional development.

This just really did not land for me at all and also the length of it really made its flaws even worse. Oh well.

The sort of central relationship of the book is between Harrow and Gideon but it's really badly developed. It opens with Gideon being dead set on leaving the planet forever due partly to Harrow's years of abuse. This desire is clearly sincere and she shows no connection to Harrow. And then when she gets tricked into being tied to Harrow for a mission for the emperor, Harrow specifically avoids her for a long period of the book. And then things develop in a way that you can predict based on genre of book but makes no sense within story. So Gideon suddenly starts showing care for Harrow even when Harrow isn't caring for her and never has done. Even when it's told from Gideon's thought process PoV it's not explained why she's suddenly doing this. Gideon puts herself into dangerous situations to rescue Harrow despite Harrow deliberately avoiding her and preventing her from actually supporting her even as a duty thing. When Harrow finally decides to make use of Gideon and wants her to do dangerous and/or autonomy reducing things, Gideon just jumps straight into it. Things like *having Harrow in her mind*. Going through excruciating agonising pain where her life energy is ripped out of her. She suddenly starts trusting Harrow for no reason without even trying to find another way. There's some vague stuff about it possibly being a prelude to her escaping but also she doesn't believe Harrow would actually let her. Theres minimal dealing with the emotional issues it's just like. Weird training montage. Then finally you get a dramatic scene where some mysteries are explained and Gideon just completely forgives Harrow for years and years of abuse. And then at the end of the book Gideon sacrifices herself for Harrow. It just feels completely and utterly unearned. There's very little development, it's just like. Ok you abused me for my entire life and all I've ever wanted to do is escape from your orbit but now we're inseparable soulmates. And then the book doesn't even give you any satisfaction from this cause Gideon just kills herself soon after. It feels really uncomfortable and weird but it feels like it's doing fanfic where I should be like oh this is so cool! Enemies to lovers! I recognise that! It's lame.

The massive palace most of the book is set in is set up to be filled with mysteries but in the end tons of the mystery is short circuited or never explained and it feels like a lot of the book was a shaggy dog story there's occasional things about the planet having insane amounts of death on it and the palace being filled with spirits who could do dodgy things and possess you because of the incredible amount of necromantic experimentation that went on there. This is used a couple of times to build up tension and then it eventually happens in the end and it's just "this 1 guy becomes a monster for a page before getting stabbed". There's lots of implications about the history and I actually love the "a world of magic on top of ancient science" vibe of the facility but it never gets delved into. There are mysterious caretakers of the facility who do things like prevent them communicating and destroying the shuttles that brought them there - barely anyone seems bothered by this. The caretakers turn out to have an incredible history but we only find that out after they die. And nothing gets explained! We learn next to nothing about the palace. Nothing about it makes sense. The whole puzzle aspect of learning through trials is completely short circuited at the end when it's just like "oh yeah I worked out to become really powerful you just stab someone you know really well. It was obvious I didn't need to do any of the puzzles" It just sucks.

As well as the mysteries of the world there's also a sort of detective mystery that starts getting going part way through. And in the end you uncover the villain... And it's so stupid!!! So the real villain was an extremely powerful necromancer who wanted to kill everyone to attract the attention of the god emperor and did this by disguising herself as someone who had cancer and was about to die. Her doing that made her also have cancer??? Which is essential to the ending??? In the ending she's shown to have incredible powers such that even with her cancer keeping her in near death it still needs 1 guy sacrificing himself in the exact right way, 2 special swords people and 2 of the same category of incredibly powerful necromancer to defeat her. Shes also shown to be able to kill people completely remotely. So why didn't she just do that? The entire book feels like a waste of time because she doesn't bother killing people in a normal amount of time when she could easily do it at any time and pick people off one by one and even if she got discovered they would all die together if they hadn't discovered the ritual yet. Instead she waits for ages so that people can finally kill her. Convenient, but a waste of my time

Just... So much of this made no sense. And to be honest it's kind of misleading that people are like "oh it's gay" like it's such a shit portrayal of ANY human relationship and it's barely there and also unsurprisingly it's another trope tragic lesbians! Of course one of them had to die! Of course it had to be the one in a subordinate social role

Also one of the 5 star reviews is topped with the quote "one flesh, one end, bitch" which in the book made me burst out laughing because it wasn't funny but came at the end of THE melodramatic and emotional scene in the book and just completely punctured any emotion the author was trying to build up. The sort of YA narrator/Buffy dialogue stuff really did not work on any level for me.… (mere)