Melody

I hate to call books "brave" because that often feels patronizing. However, this book continued to surprise me until the last page. Kyr's narrow view of her world was such a perfect restriction and felt so realistic for the situation she's in. She's a little brainwashed fascist being forced to see that her worldview isn't accurate, down to her perspective on the people she loves most. Absolutely lovely book all around.

Didn't really do much for me.

Zhu was incredibly boring to me. I wish she had more interests outside of “become great.” Ouyang was so interesting and I would have preferred his story to take more precedence.

No clue if I'll be reading the sequel. I really loved the Author's prose and some of the Gender Things, but I'm not sure if I want to invest the time into reading. We will seeee

Look, I've gotta start off with the fact that I first read this book almost a full year ago. I was about to finish college and hadn't read a book that was more than 150 pages for fun in almost 4 years. Don't ask me why I picked up this behemoth but I did. I read it in about a week. It is STILL in my head 49 weeks later.
I'm pretty sure the reason for that is simple: the atmosphere. I underlined and bracketed and scanned pages of whole chunks of this book just to re-read because the atmosphere is truly one of the most beautifully written things I've ever read.
It's funny to me when reviewers say that this is amateurish or an obvious first novel. Genuinely hilarious.