Kait

I have heard so much hype about this book, and I was really locked in for the first 50 or so percent, but I don't think Simmons could successfully convey all his ideas here. A lot of the pilgrims' storylines have unsatisfying ends that don't follow through successfully, and his storytelling style becomes more summative and told through characters' dreams or vision than directly from the characters' points of view, which becomes disjointed and makes the reader feel less connected 

>I liked Gladstone, but all the attention on Severn and Simmons's obsession with John Keats really got old. We get a lot of Gladstone's thoughts about this intergalactic war, and lot of facts, like the number of people on the planets in the Web who had to flee, but we didn't get much literary depth about the Ousters and the Hegemony. There are still two books left, so maybe this is more if a thing in those, but the whole time Severn was dying of tuberculosis, I wished that we were experiencing more of this war instead. I thought Kassad's POV would go into this more, being that he is from the Hegemony's army, but his parts were just about how he's an action hero.Severn also drove me a bit crazy, because he seemed to be there to summarize everything we just read. I didn't really understand this. I thought he and Lamia would pick up Johnny's mission, but instead Johnny came back to do it himself. Severn did not add much to the story in my opinion, which was annoying because we spent a lot of page time with him. I didn't find that Simmons did a great job conveying the datasphere to us, and his concept of AIs as this terrible thing was constantly mentioned but we don't actually see it. I thought Severn would give us more insight into the AIs and how they operate and control things, but he really didn't. He is just told by Ummon that actually there's a whole bunch of stuff going on that we don't get to see. I thought it was already revealed that Earth was destroyed by the AIs but this part acted like it was a big reveal. I don't know, Simmons really did a lot of telling and not showing with some of his farther-reaching ideas, and the AI stuff and really most of the war falls into this category.  Also, the part of the book where Severn was mistaken for some famous Keats student made me laugh. Why is everyone in this damn universe obsessed with Keats? Simmons really took his special interest and made it normal and popular in his fictional universe.This story did not feature the Shrike as much as I thought it would. When it was there, a lot of on-page time was spent doing decidedly un-scary things. It attends a funeral, which actually made me laugh and kind of ruined its image forever in my head. It carries a baby in its arms. It does surgery on Dure? I'm still not really sure why it hooked Lamia up to the Datasphere instead of just putting her in the tree with Silenus. Even the fight scenes with Kassad felt more gimmicky than scary, with the hundreds of Shrikes appearing or whatever. It struck me as more silly and less scary. And Kassad didn't do much outsmarting. Even though I think the action scenes were well-choreographed, I found it hard to get invested with a regular guy's fight with a being that can make hundreds of copies of itself.I thought that what Simmons did with Rachel was interesting (mostly), but Sol really got shafted. In Hyperion, we talk about his life's work being The Abraham Problem, and while he talks about it again here, there isn't much critical introspection. He comes to the realization that obeying God isn't about obedience, it's actually about faith in the divine, which... it took him his whole life to figure that out?! Pretty sure the Bible tells you this. I thought he'd come to a more conclusion about this, but this was such a non-deliverer. The whole scene of him just handing his infant to the Shrike was kind of a letdown after all that buildup. Simmons really got me with a whole countdown to the end of Rachel's life and then he just... hands her off. I was most invested in Rachel's story and this was the first time I realized the book was not going to deliver on everything that was built up in Hyperion.Rachel/Moneta is interesting. A time traveling love interest always hits. I dislike that Moneta is the Shrike's consort and keeper. Because why would a woman exist and not be a consort. Simmons is probably the least sexy guy alive. His handling of rape is unacceptable, which is the classic way men perceive rape with the “rape him until he likes it” method. This is a disgusting way to handle sexual assault and Simmons sucks for it. He also completely brushed off the trauma that Kassad suffered from his experience in Hyperion. Literally nothing Simmons has written about sex or romance has been appealing, from a human being point of view, not even a literary one. Anyway I'm assuming Moneta exists in the next two books.Silenus was the character that handled the theme of art and creation, except Severn also handled this in his constant mentioning of Keats. Silenus is terrible and I hated reading about him. I wonder if his experience writing his work is similar to Simmons's experience writing this. There's something to be said about the way he handled muses, where a horrible thing causes so much inspiration. I did find that Silenus's experience of the Tree of Pain made it seem less scary. It was very predictable that he found Sad King Billy there.Duré's story was fine, like I said the surgery from the Shrike was weird. I guess it's a good conclusion to his story that he becomes the Pope, since he was literally crucified and Catholics love that, but he just came back from the dead and I don't really understand how that happened. Apparently there was a vote, but bro just came back from the dead days ago. Also, his story was full of farcaster portal jug and felt very disjointed. One minute he's at the time tombs, then he's on a spaceship, then he's in the Pope place. I started to really dislike when his parts came up because it didn't fit in well with the rest of what was happening in the story. His crime of falsifying documents to prove that God existed before humans isn't brought up much even though this based in reality. Now that he's back from the dead everyone forgets about it and he's the Pope now. Okay?I don't have much to say about the Consul's story except that I didn't like it. I thought more about the Ousters would be revealed but other than learning what they sort of look like, we didn't learn much. The Hawking Matt was such a dumb device to include. I don't think Simmons devoted enough page-time to him to be successful, and since we don't actually know much about the war or the Ousters I didn't feel very invested in his story.

Simmons included so many ideas and themes in this book; there's religion and divinity, faith, parenthood, art and its creation, war, revenge, sacrifice, love, pain, and I even think there's something in here about artificial intelligence. I don't think he handled many of these very well. His thoughts about religion became repetitive and were very surface-level, but he excludes non-Abrahamic religions and even then he has nothing to say about Islamic religion or culture. Even Andy Weir was able to put some thoughts about space Muslims in his book, and it was really disappointing to find nothing here. I think Simmons was most successful with his thoughts about parenthood, and I really did like Rachel and Sol's story for the most part.

I did really like the first half of the book, when there was so much potential. I think Simmon's ideas and attempts at literary writing got jumbled up until he tripped all over himself in the last half of this book. It's a shame that he didn't spend more time doing character work with his newer characters, because he did a great job with that in Hyperion and that probably would have elevated the story and driven some of these themes more successfully. Mechanically the story is interesting, and I see what Simmons was going for with switches from this person to first and playing with tenses. I don't think his descriptions and imagery were as meaningful or powerful as they were in the first book, and overall the writing slipped as I mentioned to more summative and fast-paced rather than in-depth and immersion as more events and action-based scenes unfolded. 

I think 3 stars is my final rating. I'm disappointed with how things panned out, but I did like the ride in the first half of the book. I would be a little more forgiving if there wasn't so much Keats.

This was a fun conclusion to the unique world that the first book set up.
I'm gonna start by saying that I did not know this was a duology! I guess that's my fault but I really assumed it would be a trilogy. 
I think this would've really worked as a trilogy, because I found the ending to be the weakest part. There are a few plot threads that didn't feel concluded to me. What about Ligea? What about Halla's future? What about the countries that have no rulers now?
Theo abandoning the crown for Imogen felt unsatisfying. He alluded to being kind of unhappy ruling a few times, but like the job is really stressful. He was so set on performing his duty and doing his best for his country. Seeing him abandon all that specifically for Imogen felt wrong for his character, and I'm pretty sure there were other ways to get them to work.
I was also pretty unsatisfied with Halla. Theo was cruel to her for a lot of their interactions, and Imogen went from nice to horrible very quickly. I hope that Cassidy wants to return to the world and explore Halla a bit more. I really just want good things for her.  
I liked most of the rest of the story. Agatha and Lachlan got their happy ending. All the bad guys are dead. I also really liked Imogen. She's very flawed, and I think it shows skill to write a character who is so compelling but also so imperfect. The writing, once again, was beautiful and haunting without being overly flowery. The description of Ligea in the pool with veins attached to her was so creepy, and many of the descriptions of Eusia were similar. I also really like Theo lol, he would've earned extra points if he was nicer to Halla but I enjoyed him as a love interest and as a character. He's less compelling by seemingly not having any of his own goals, but I love a man who throws away everything for his love.

The sexy scenes were really good, and very sexy. I definitely got to a point where I kind of wished they would stop, but it was all good fun and I thought it never made me feel like I was sacrificing plot.
I am still so interested in this world. I want to know more about the other countries, about the siren goddesses, about how things will resolve after the story and about how things came to be. I really hope this universe is expanded upon a bit more. I didn't like this book as much as the first, just because I think the first book had some really powerful scenes while this book was much more action-and plot-focused, but I really enjoyed both of them.
I will keep an eye on Kalie Cassidy and see what else she has up her sleeve!

I'm not continuing with this series.
I know romantasy, at times, is just an excuse to read sex scenes. Some people are fine with that. I demand more from my books, especially when the structure of a decent plot is already there.
This whole “forbidden romance” element was annoying and not done well. With the end of the book in mind, this makes a little more sense. But watching Thea go crawling back to a guy who won't just be in a relationship with her got so repetitive and irritating. I get one time, but they had full sex (and then some) like four times. Stop it. Stop fucking this man. Thea is like your drunk friend at the club. Just sit down and eat a snack and you'll forget about him.
It was unsatisfying that Thea's solution to being mad at Wren was to just forgive her. I thought she'd have some epiphany or figure something out about her past, but no! She just decides to stop being mad. Okay lol. They also have the exact same argument they had in the previous book, which is that Thea is selfish and doesn't care about Wren's goals, which... she doesn't. 
Thea was pretty immature this whole book, and was kind of bratty to everyone except Wilder. I dislike her much more now than I did at the end of the second book.
There was one training scene in this book. The plot is that she is supposed to be doing warsword training. This was the most frustrating thing. We just completely didn't care about the plot.
I also feel like what little plot there was got kind of muddled. I don't know a lot about this story. What's the veil, exactly? How does magic work? What is the actual history of this country? I feel like I should know that since the story is military based. For all that the first book was about women being unable to use weapons, we have literally never talked about that ever again. Wtf, Thea? Don't you want other women to have the same opportunity that you did? Oh wait, you don't. Because you're as selfish as Wren says. 
I read The Curse of Broken Shadows recently, and while I didn't love it, it was definitely executed better than this book. It's a similar idea with monsters and a veil, but it's an urban fantasy instead. That book did a pretty decent job of explaining magic and worldbuilding. This book hasn't really explained anything about magic at all. Where does it come from? Who gets it? What can those with magic actually do? I don't believe that magic systems always have to be explained down to every detail, but I won't feel invested in the story if the magic doesn't have a definition.
I'm not motivated to continue. I kind of want to know what's going on with Wilder, but my Libby only had up to the second book, and my Hoopla just reduced from 5 books a month to 4 books a month and I don't want to use one of those spots for the next book. If my library ever gets it in Libby I guess I'd continue, but that's the only way I'd keep going. 

I started out really liking this. In a post-covid world, I think it's really interesting to re-examine something like this. Then once it stopped being the logistics of how people would initially respond to an epidemic and started being a survival story, it went very sharply downhill.

Let's address some things: I think this is pretty mired in ableism. Would society collapse if everyone went blind? Probably a bit. But blind people have been around for a very long time, and I'm really wondering if Jose Saramago did research with blind people advising him. He even states at one point, “Blindness is also this: to live in a world where all hope is gone.” I think there is a way to write about the pain and struggle of losing one of the senses without being so damn bleak and nihilistic.

There is also a lot of misogyny. The book was permeated with direct or indirect ways women were used or mistreated. Women are exclusively portrayed as wives, caretakers, or whores, sometimes in combination with each other. I almost had to stop reading during this plot where the women were taken for sex. Jose Saramago wrote this in a lot of detail and I really wanted to stop reading at this point. I really got annoyed when Saramago narratively pat himself on the back for making the glasses-wearing woman character, who he continually refers to as the GIRL in dark glasses so I thought she was a minor at first, concerned about her parents. Yes! Women can enjoy noncommittal sex and love their parents. Groundbreaking.

There were some silly things, like a guy dying of a leg infection in like two days. It would take way longer than that. I also think that leaving people in an asylum with no well person to run it is a bit crazy, too. Some people want power more than they are afraid of illness, and a military leader would've fit in here. I didn't see much talk about how the blindness spread, either, or any PPE which certainly existed at the time. Kind of crazy to have your main character be a doctor and write the least medically inquisitive ever.

I'm not sure why Saramago was so fixated on cleanliness and excrement. There are places all over the world where people don't have running water or much and they are able to keep clean. Saramago spent a lot of narrative work destroying individuality and community, which I guess would lead to these problems but I don't think it had to be like this.

He was also fixated on identity, which I know is some socialist thinking that he applied to this society, but it came off ableist as fuck. Does Saramago think blind people don't have a sense of identity? I kind of understood what he was doing with this, but I don't think it worked in this setting. This is a more ungenerous take for me, but I didn't think it fit in with the story.

I don't know if I have different opinions about society than Jose Saramago or what, but I found a lot of the Marxism over the top and unrealistic. This is supposed to be a study of societal breakdown, but somehow, even though there are only three women and basically everyone else on page is male, this book feels more like a study of women, by someone who has never spoken to a woman. Even the woman who has been surviving on her own is a “witch”. Every woman is immediately generalized by the narrative. The scene toward the end where all the ladies are sitting around talking about whether or not they're beautiful was like… so vapid and dumb.

I thought the scene where the wife finds all the creepy shit in the church was pretty cool, it was annoying that we had to hear the thoughts of some kind of writer character instead of exploring that.

Overall I see the exploration of the degradation of society, but this story was so damn patriarchal and misogynist that I couldn’t overlook it to see the bigger commentary on society as a whole. There’s a sequel that, during the first half of the book, I thought I’d want to check out to see the aftermath, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to read Jose Saramago’s thoughts on anything else. 2.5 stars, because I thought the first half was really interesting and I really, really hated almost all of everything past the 55% mark or so.

I may have gone into this with too-high expectations, because everything I’ve heard about this book has been people raving about how great it is, but I thought this was just okay.

The magic system is certainly unique, but the fact that we’re told that infected are all killed and there’s none around, and we meet three of them in this book before it’s halfway over makes it seem a little dramatic. I wish we got more information. Where are these cards from? Why are they scattered around? Degeneration also seemed pretty inconsistent. Why isn’t Ravyn degenerating so much? He says he can’t use the cards, but that doesn’t seem equivalent to what Elspeth or Emery went through.

I find that the biggest flaw with this book is that it’s underdeveloped. The world seems thought-through, developed, and intricate, but actually all that we know is that there’s a wood and mist, which is readily available information in the summary. How big is the wood? What’s in it besides the mist? Getting away from the wood, what does the town look like? I didn’t really have a picture, except maybe a vague British medieval town, but the name “Ravyn” kind of ruins that idea. Also, how big is this place? It seems like the only place around, but it can’t be. There are so many families there have to be other villages nearby. The book is fine as it is, if a little empty-feeling, but it could’ve been really immersive and interesting if a little more effort was put in. Also, for a world that has an illness that apparently grants people magical power and probably leads to them getting killed, why is there no name for this besides "the infection"? This started to feel silly the longer it went on. Gillig really should've slapped some kind of name onto this.

I didn’t really like Ravyn. I thought I would, at first, because he had an outside motivation–saving his brother–and was being tricky and manipulative. I didn’t think his magic ability made a lot of sense. He had a line that was like “don’t trust me, I’m dangerous” and I found it to be really cringey. Characters should never say this unless they’re going through some kind of manic episode or trying to scare someone else. Played straight this is a weird thing to say for almost any reason. I wanted to see more of him being a brother and a leader on page, as a love interest I really wasn’t that interested in him.

Elspeth was okay as a protagonist. She wasn’t useless or stupid, but I did feel that she didn’t do much to propel the plot. I think Gillig tends to write more plot-centered stories than character-focused ones, but she’s deceptive about it because her characters deliberate and plot and talk so much that it seems character focused.

There were a lot of characters there in the background, and honestly now that I've finished the book I'd be hard-pressed to tell you much about almost any of them. They were there to either help a little or be antagonistic. I didn't really feel like I got to know anything about them. I don't even think Ravyn or Elspeth really evolved as people during the story at all. They started out with certain goals and needs and at the end of the book they have really the same goals and needs, just more intensely. (I guess Elspeth did evolve as a person but in a way more literal sense than I would've hoped for.)

There was kind of a lot going on in this book. I thought at first that this was going to be a court intrigue/heist plot, but that only lasted for a short while and then it became about Elspeth continually getting herself out of trouble with the monster. This did make the whole theft plot feel a little unsatisfying and rushed. All this stuff together left me feeling like nothing really got its due payoff, we just closed one little plot loop and moved right o to the next thing.

I do think Gillig did a good job building tension. The scene where Elspeth was in the woods hiding, holding a hand over her mouth to keep quiet was really interesting. I actually really liked that whole sequence, with Jespyr in danger and the monster taking over. I did think that the subsequent scenes where she asks the monster for help felt kind of repetitive. I was really kind of let down that the monster Elspeth had been talking to was the Shepherd King. I thought maybe it would be a person who was forced to go into the mist. I also feel like I don’t really understand the consequences of this. I guess he’ll come back, but there has been a bunch of spooky shit happening already so what is his return really going to predicate? (Other than Elspeth getting body snatched or whatever, but I mean what does it mean for the universe.)

I think the end dragged a bit. I didn’t feel any tension at the end because I think once we got to the point that Elspeth’s body was being taken over, it was pretty apparent what was going to happen. I don't even find myself that invested in the solution to all these problems, because I'm sure they'll figure it out.

Overall I wasn’t that impressed with the book, but I will continue. I put the next book on hold on libby and it’s a super long wait so I’ll read it at some point. I’m fine with a wait, I’m not really chomping at the bit to get to the next one. I am a little perplexed about what everyone else really loved about this book, because it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever read but I think it was run-of-the-mill quality, with a unique magic-system and world that I don’t find myself appreciating much because it’s not done with enough care, and with below average attention to theming. As a debut book, this is pretty good, and I already see evidence with The Knight and the Moth that Gillig has improved her skills. 3 stars, and I feel like I’m rounding up a little bit.