Ben Saufley

I really enjoyed this one. I'm completely aware that I'm a sucker for school books, especially "magic school", but the magic in this one was really interesting, the atmosphere was great, and the romance was charming.

Ooh boy it gets very heavy-handed at the end. But I do appreciate how Pullman refuses to pigeonhole his characters and to wrap most things up with a tidy bow—characters who were antagonists early on show some goodness, perhaps even redeeming goodness, and not everybody gets what they want in the end. The wrap-up is full of messaging that I liked but which I suppose I wish were a bit more subtle.

I really enjoyed this book, but I liked the first half a lot more than the second. There is a major, and kind of disorienting, pivot at that point and it goes from having a clear arc to a kind of listlessness with the kind of aftermath of the first half of the book. I was certain Pierce and Ellie were both alive, in part because of how quickly their death came and went; I was half-right, but the way that was revealed felt like an afterthought instead of what I assumed would bring the book around to a satisfying conclusion.

Liu is a very intelligent writer who writes compelling characters and creates an interesting image of the near future. One thing I kept thinking about was how some of the tech he introduced read, to me, as his bets on what current early-stage tech survives and thrives. And it's not necessarily what I'd have guessed. I think the major suspension of disbelief for me was in the idea of a personal AI that didn't live in or process via the cloud. We have a lot of leaps before something like what we're seeing now is available in a form that is both fast and local.

It also seemed rosier about the future of AI—even with the many dystopian angles—than I might have expected.

I enjoyed most of this book but the resolution was pretty deeply unsatisfying and left a lot of loose ends—any thriller/mystery that's any good will employ red herrings, but most of the red herrings at play here seem very forced in retrospect. Beyond that, the over-explanation at the end was at a certain point kind of silly. I'm all for making it clear what happened but it was made clear a few times over and then the characters internal-monologued their justifications on top of that.

I'm trying not to just give everything a 3 simply because I still mostly enjoyed it. So, this gets 2.5.

I really thought I'd like this more than I did. It was interesting, but it seemed to have a "point"… that it never really got to. Like there were undercurrents of a philosophical or ethical statement being made, and plenty of broader ideas were clear—the world is cruel to women; capitalism is a monster; the environment will change—and I generally agree, but it never added up to any more compelling thesis. Also the fixation on overpopulation was strange to read; it feels like a theme from a prior era, and dampened the anti-corporate argument. It all seemed to build toward something and then just kind of end. Which left me with just the impact of the vignettes it pieced together, which were interesting but a little disappointing as a whole.