Spark and Tether

This is just a really, really lovely book. I found myself fascinated by the unique, well-drawn worldbuilding and caught up in the mystery that slowly got unraveled across the course of the book. Atmospheres and environments felt immersive, and I thought the prose was fluid and flowed very well; descriptive, but graceful enough to avoid being too much. There was a good balance of action, exposition, plot, and exploration of relationships. (Platonic as well as romantic; I'll come back to that.)

I loved that the main romantic pairing experienced very serious adversity (that isn't really a spoiler; it's obvious in the prologue) without either of them being villainized. Yes, they did make mistakes, but ones that I found totally understandable in the circumstances they were facing. It made it so much easier to cheer for them to find their way back to each other, and by the end of the book I was racing along because I wanted to know how things would turn out for them. Plot threads were tied up in a satisfying way—no unexpected cliffhangers here!—but I am still excited to see where the series goes in the future. This universe offers so much potential for exploration.

Finally, as someone who is asexual and probably also somewhere on the aromantic spectrum, I really loved that one main character had a long-term, profoundly important platonic relationship that was given almost as much weight as the romance was. Fantastic book all around.

(I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.)