Melody

Holy fuck

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

man i really don't know about this book. i enjoyed the unspoken name quite a bit, but the tone shift in this one really hit me. everything was a lot more dire and world-endingly bad, instead of the adventurous and momentarily perilous excitement i wanted. also, not enough csorwe :/

if i had to assign colors to each book, the unspoken name is green and blue and dirt brown and the thousand eyes is red and black. if you like the first few chapters after the time jump, stay the course and you may like the end. if you hate them, dnf cause it's not gonna change much until the very, very last pages.

unfortunately this is like a 1.5 for me. admittedly, i'm not a huge fan of stories where kids are MCs and i mostly like fantasy and shit, so this book was absolutely not aimed at me. if you generally enjoy high schooler stories, horse girls, teenage sapphics, etc, then you may well like this!!

if you don't really like this sort of story, here's what really turned me off of it lol. the story itself may have been fine but there were some really weird mistakes and tone issues that just killed the whole book for me (like, someone is wearing a “bi-proud” flag instead of “bi-pride” flag or the one sentence fragment a few chapters in that made no sense stylistically so it must have been an editing error??). there were enough of these little weirds that i just couldn't deal. skimmed the last half