Nic

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.

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!

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.

funny, heartfelt, easy to read

Fun book from my childhood!

I don't think it's the best in the series, but lots of fun with plenty of wonderful characters. It gets surprisingly intense at some points, but also a little easy for the protagonists sometimes.

Pretty writing as always and lovely descriptions.

Somehow this book is about, like...working environments? The villains get into trouble because they create environments in which their employees are fighting for dominance and trying to get the promotion from each other. The protagonists do well because they work together and let people collaborate and cooperate. Definitely not what this book is about, but also it definitely is.

I picked up this book expecting just a fun ya adventure to relax during lots of assignments, but I was delightfully surprised. The world was intriguing and dangled in front of me quite excitingly, with little exposition. I was also quite surprised by Albert - he was quite odd in an endearing way that I didn't expect.

The adventures and action scenes were fun, and there was a particular one near the end that was so intense and creepy that I realised afterwards how much I had tensed up reading it. That doesn't happen very often for me.

Some of the descriptions were lovely and creative, but I found a couple of settings quite difficult to picture (mostly the ones near the end, though they were very unique).

There were a few moments of dialogue that felt weird, and a bit of unnecessary and stilting monologues near the end, but overall, a wonderful read if you want something fun.

It felt great on its own, but if I come across the sequel, I'll definitely give it a read.

I loved book 1 (City of Last Chances) so much - this one was sometimes better sometimes worse, but I overall liked City better.

I've heard this book described as fantasy M*A*S*H, and I have to agree - funny quirky characters, but doesn't shy away from the reality of war. The first half was so good - intense, exciting, more amazing world building.

The second half felt a bit too episodic - some events just ended too quickly for me to take them seriously, even if they were still fun.

I love this world and how authentic the characters are. I'm not sure if there will be more in this world, but I'd read it if there was.