Isabella

“there are many thresholds, i'm learning, with a body that is bad and then good and then bad again.”

Made me want to throw up a various points, and I say that with high regard.

Something I always adore about Olivie's writing is her talent for writing people. Each one of her characters is so rounded and understood to the point that they're really the only important part of the series. Sure there's a well curated plot and well-researched background, but none of it would matter without this group of six unreliable, witty, selfish, and arrogant medians that somehow all have an irresistible air about them.

Did make my brain hurt though and like I'm all about some interpretational factors but sometimes can you just give me a straight answer Olivie, don't play with me. My emotions are on a high and I don't know what to believe.

I feel like this book was a whole lot of building toward something that never comes to fruition and not one character has any serious development.
Despite there being a massive dragon on the cover, one only appears for all of about 4 pages in the last 15 pages.

I, too, am a caffeine addicted rat.

I had to claw my way through this book to the point that it's set me back on my reading goal for the year.
I wanted so bad to like this book, I tried so hard to get into it but none of it seemed like it wanted to tell a story more than it wanted to be meaninglessly edgy. It tries so hard to achieve an artistic twist on the grotesque but ends up just being too consumed in that and loses its grasp on anything else it wants to convey, I fear.

Toward the end I started to get into it a bit more but it just didn't seem worth it considering the other 300 pages were such a drag.

I'm not saying it's inherently a terrible book it just really didn't give me anything I wanted and at times feels like a cheap knockoff of a lot of other sci fi and fantasy I've encountered.