bilal

i'm a sucker for stories about coming of age and friendships so i enjoyed this book!

i don't know how accurate of a portrayal this book is of alexithymia, i would guess not wholly and is why in the foreword notes, the author mentions using their imagination alongside what they've read of the phenomenon

dora (and arguably gon to an extent) are pretty much there for the sake of highlighting yunjae's progression with his amygdala. i'm not sure that's particularly bad really for this book and the author kind of hints at that with mentioning that the reason gon does things like torturing the butterfly was to teach yunjae empathy, though it made the book come off as a bit surface level at times for me instead of exploring this in a more natural progression manner

the monotone-ness of the book makes sense and didn't detract from the read, making both gon and dora's emotions shine brighter but also when yunjae's emotions peek through in his development more impactful

pacing in part 2 felt a bit slow, while pacing in part 4 also felt a bit rushed but nothing too egregious

a fun murder mystery that was fairly well paced, very similar to christie's and then there were none

enjoyable book for the most part! lots of dystopian, post-calamity worldbuilding towards the latter half of the book and such, though the pacing of the first third of the book was pretty slow.

i didn't enjoy the rebellion war and all that, felt like there were some plot holes that didn't really make sense to me such as why would they be able to manufacture guns in this scenario but be scarce for other materials (or why they would know how to make guns in general).

i also thought the romance between lukas and juliette was a bit unnecessary and took away from the main premise of the book a bit

i did like the way chapters were laid out to go back and forth between characters to setup suspense throughout, though i would've enjoyed if they continued with a particular character's for a chapter or two before switching at times for momentum

also, a lot of the side characters were very underdeveloped and was a contributing factor as to why the rebellion felt very lacklustre

the ending felt very rushed for me and also fairly anticlimactic so that was a letdown

overall, a decent sci-fi novel but probably wouldn't be too keen to read the other books in the trilogy for now

pretty slow to start for such a short novel but got me hooked towards the end - i think i would've preferred a more open-ended ending but i do enjoy that i could get something out of the book on re-reads

some nice passages in this here and there but i knew most of what this was trying to get across already so it wasn't eye-opening or anything

also the book was a lot more focused on tennis than i anticipated for a book that's recommended so often for general learning habits, which felt a bit boring at times