Amber

DNF at chapter 29. No regrets..

I tried. Genuinely, sincerely, nine hours of my life tried. I came in fully prepared to love this because BookTok told me to and I trust BookTok approximately 70% of the time. This was the 30%.

Here's the thing nobody warns you about before you commit nine hours to this audiobook: Pierce Brown writes like you already passed the exam on his world. He drops terms like you took the prerequisite. Helldiver, clawDrill, bloodydamn, and fifteen shades of the same Irish accent all blur into a wall of "I think something just happened but I genuinely cannot tell who said it to whom." The narrator (Tim Gerard Reynolds) is beloved by approximately half the internet. I am firmly in the other half. Every character, internal narration, battle cry, whispered threat, and casual piss joke sounds exactly the same. I lost track of who was speaking so often I started treating it like white noise.

Which brings me to the piss jokes. There are... so many. I get that they're teenage boys. But good Lord....lay off the bodily functions please.

The school section, which is where I spent the bulk of my listening time, is basically Lord of the Flies on Mars with extra steps and significantly more bodily fluid references. I kept waiting for a plot. Actual plot. The kind where things happen for reasons beyond "power is good, weakness is death, also here is a sentence about urine." It didn't come.

I care about zero characters. Darrow included. Especially Darrow. Multiple literary critics have confirmed this is a known issue and not a me problem, which is the one thing this book gave me that I'll hold onto.

The anxiety this book produced was not the good kind. Not the Sanderson "oh no what's happening to my favorite found family" kind. More like the "I have seventeen things due and my inbox is on fire" kind. I don't read to feel like I forgot to file my taxes.

Never Again. Ever.