Sara

save yourself some time and read the fig tree passage from sylvia plath's the bell jar. that's the whole book pared down to one paragraph. you're welcome

I wanted to like this book real bad.

I enjoyed the first half, the setting and mechs were really cool, and the commentary Zetian had on the trappings of patriarchy were the high points of the book for me. Unfortunately, it went downhill from there. I could tell this was a debut novel. The writing was not very good but I could get through it, the dialogue was very teen, the plot points were pretty obvious or done in a contrived fashion so it could create conflict later (eg, mild spoiler, Zetian not telling the two guys about the nudes IMMEDIATELY, it would have made more character sense, and the reveal that Yizhi already knew about it and didn't care would've been cooler ).

I could take all of that, but my real issue is more of the message it had about feminism and change by the end of the book. Yes, the current system for the women in this world was bad, but the way to change it is...only by violence. There's no other option that our main character Zetian can think of taking. There were no other women that could fix this world, or made it better in any way. Zetian killed most of the women that feature heavily in the book herself. I mean, she killed many more nameless men as well, but still. Hard to start the feminist cultural revolution without breaking a few hundred eggs :/ Fellas, is it feminist to kill indiscriminately?

This book just made me downcast and frustrated. It could get better as set up for the future book, but I'm not going to read it so...yeah.

A neurodivergent Holmes and Watson duo solving a murder mystery in a fantasy world where technology is all biological, where plants and humans and parasites are engineered to serve different purposes in this Empire to deal with everything from small but deadly contagions to large Leviathans outside their sea wall.

Gosh, I really enjoyed this. The relationship between the riders and their dragons being very equal and arguing with each other was awesome, and I really enjoyed the dynamics between Holt and Ash and also between Talia and Pyra. The focus on the main pair with Ash being blind and going into essentially dragon eugenics is such an interesting topic, and the Scourge is a really cool antagonist. And the writing is pretty good!

The only problem I had with this was the magic system being straight out of DnD or a video game. The idea of ‘leveling up' and using percentages of a magic pool, and having a cooldown of a few seconds after every named spell (by the way, who knows what a second is in medieval times?), and having buffs if one eats specific foods just really took me out of the battle scenes hard, and I really did not like it :/

Man I hope I forget this story. Way too much prose for not enough story, and ended in such a weird way. It tells way more than it shows, and only mentions cool things that Addie has gone through that we don't get to see. Henry comes in way too late but then is not really important for the actual plot, which is Addie and her emotionally abusive relationship with the devil. It's giving reading It Ends with Us in a New York art museum surrounded by white women.