I read it! And, uh. I didn't like it. A LOT. SORRY. Details under the cut (squees are harshed, etc). If you liked the book, don't worry - it's me, not you! I hope you continue to enjoy it. Under the cut, I detail all the reasons why I hated this book with the power of 10,000 flaming suns.



My big problem at the beginning of this book never really stopped being a problem, which is that at least two-thirds of it is depressing as fuck and by the time it FINALLY got out of the miserable trudge (after what I estimate was about 80-90K of endless cycles of Terrible People Do Terrible Things And Harrow Is Depressed and Gross Bloody Stuff Happens), I didn't really care anymore.

I actually have an extremely good comparison for exactly the effect this book had on me, which is Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series. This was sort of a speed-run version of it. In that case, it was more like:

Book 1: I love these characters! Things were really terrible in this book but I'm really looking forward to the reconciliation/healing that is probably happening in the next book.

Books 2-3: Endless horrible things happen until the reader is emotionally ground down to the point where she hates every single character and doesn't care anymore.

Book 4: We finally get the reconciliation and healing which I can sort of tell I would have loved two books ago but now really don't care about.

So yeah. Speedrun version of that.

Part of the problem was that I figured everything out REALLY early. By the time I was a few chapters in, I was confident that:

- Harrow had somehow deleted, blocked, or overwritten her memories and was doing an on-the-fly find-replace for "Gideon" to "Ortus."
- Therefore the person she was calling Ortus the First was actually the original Gideon, the one mentioned in the letter last book.
- The memories that failed to match reality were some kind of simulation running in her brain to keep her from realizing the truth.

I was somewhat wrong about the memories, which I thought were happening entirely in Harrow's head, with the Sleeper working for Harrow, as part of her mind, wiping out any stray thoughts that happened to get too close to the truth.

Unfortunately being wrong about that, of all things, made me actively uninterested in those parts, which I assumed were completely unreal, while also being uninterested in the Harrow parts because they were depressing and I actively did not care about every single character other than Harrow while steadily losing interest in her too. So at that point it was just a matter of watching the characters murder worlds and backstab each other while waiting FOREVER for the characters to figure out what I had already figured out ages ago. (Also, what was the point of giving Harrow 24 sealed letters when we only saw her open 2 or 3 of them, all of which contained information she could have put in the original letter? And none of which matter now since she has her memories again? I am actually STILL angry about that! It's a trope I love that fizzled so spectacularly I genuinely cannot figure out why the actual everloving potato pancakes the author even put it in.)

I had exactly one moment of truly transcendental joy reading this book, that I truly did not see coming, and that was when Camilla showed up and it turned out that Palamedes wasn't dead - well, I mean, dead, yes, but not gone. I figured Gideon survived, but I had absolutely no idea about him, and since I loved Camilla and Palamedes in the previous book, it was a total delight to see them again.

Unfortunately, the other thing this scene did was highlight what wasn't working for me about the rest of it. After umptyzillion chapters of hatereading, I found myself tuning in as soon as Camilla showed up, and Pal hugging and kissing Harrow was really, truly sweet, and suddenly reminded me how much the characters had bonded in the previous book.

And made me realize that in something like 80K of book (I estimated based on the Amazon page count that it's at least 150K; this book is huge) this was literally the first time any character had done anything, anything at all, that was truly caring, kind, affectionate, or selfless. THE FIRST TIME.

At that point I checked out permanently. I went ahead and cruised to the end, and enjoyed hearing Gideon's narrative voice again, and it's nice to know Camilla & co. are still running around out there, and that more characters survived than I thought from the first book! But also, IDGAF. I cannot even tell you how much I do not want to read Alecto's book, based on the backstabbing horribleness of every other person John surrounded himself with.

As a final death blow to any chance of me reading further in this series, while in the first book the pop culture references and contemporary jokes didn't bother me (they went along with Gideon's irreverent narration) in this book they jarred horribly. The Miette joke in particular drop-kicked me straight out of any sense of immersion I had still been enjoying up to that point. Also, the first book didn't read like serial-numbers-filed-off Homestuck fanfic to me, but this one really, really did. (It didn't help that here, I could actually tell EXACTLY who the characters were expys of, at least the John-Rose-Dave-Jade group - at one point I think she either forgot to change, or didn't care to change, a reference to Rose/Roxy's pink hair - while in the first book the cast read more like original characters and were much easier to accept that way. But it wasn't just that; it was the worldbuilding and the tone and just kind of ... everything. Also, I really liked Gideon as an original character and I didn't need to have it rubbed in my face that she's a blatant expy of Dave Strider, I REALLY REALLY DIDN'T.)

So yeah. I'm glad people like this, and I could see myself enjoying the first book again someday, once this has faded a bit, especially with the foreknowledge that not everyone who appears to die is actually dead. The rest of the series, though? NOooOPE.