Nic

Wasn't sure what to expect coming into this and I was pretty surprised.

The writing itself was a bit lacklustre in terms of description and some of the relationships moved a bit too fast. But it was amazing to have more of the Avatar world - from a different POV, a different time and a completely different tone to the shows. The plot was exciting and fast and shocked me at times.

It doesn't at all suffer from the prequel problem - even though I know what Kyoshi becomes, I was still invested in her character and the surrounding characters and in the backstory of how she becomes.

I will be reading the next one.

I really liked this one - engaging mystery, humour, and some delightfully frustrating characters. It didn't quite have the emotional impact of the first book, but I guess that makes sense in the context. Though I did have fun exploring Ernest's relationship and seeing just how how much of an idiot he is - very enjoyable.
Unfortunately, like the first one, I found there to be way too much info dumped on me right at the end. Too much for me to ever guess it all, even if I can guess whodunnit based off vibes. Which is kind of annoying, because Stevenson is good at drip feeding clues - I just wish we got more of those big revelations throughout the book, so it wasn't such a leap to the solve at the end.
I hope he writes another one.

I liked the characters, but the way the world worked was a bit arbitrary at times, making the plot much less engaging.

As someone not from NY, Jemisin did a great job of showing what the city is like and portraying authentic experiences - She said she did a ton of research in the acknowledgements and I totally believe it.

I thought this was delightful!

Certainly not a perfect book (main thing is probably the extremely thin romances), but I had lots of fun exploring the language. I normally find epistolary novels kind of boring, but I was engaged the whole time and read it pretty quick, so props to Mark. The characters were fun and quirky and there was a combination of really sweet moments and higher stakes than I expected.

This gave me a similar feeling to The Seven Deaths - a crunchy, complex mystery where you're wondering 'what is going on?' as often as 'whodunnit'

There were some fun ideas and interesting questions to ponder, I loved the point of view and there were some greatly intense as well as some nice and sweet moments.

It didn't quite measure up to Seven Deaths for me, just because of the loss of tension and questions for the middle chunk, and perhaps the characters being much more simplistic. Maybe not simple, but a lot more of an open book - most of the characters didn't felt like a mystery to me.

I loved it, I'm keen to read all of Turton's books!