Queer YA space adventure romance. Fifteen-year-old Taro would do anything for his savior and adoptive sister Eve, including remake himself into an entQueer YA space adventure romance. Fifteen-year-old Taro would do anything for his savior and adoptive sister Eve, including remake himself into an entirely different kind of person: a sober young man who values education, never gets into bar fights, and is absolutely not in love with his sister's lover. When Eve picks up another rescuee from her past, the sweet-tempered, charismatic and useless ex-sex slave Rafe, it's the catalyst for some soul-searching, shifting feelings and a life-or-death adventure.
This was very enjoyable, and very light on depth. Taro's incredible competence at everything from fighting to piloting a space ship to surviving in the wilderness, without ever being a jerk about it, is very satisfying to read. There's something great about a character who can do freaking everything but puts himself second, in nearly every situation. Not just in terms of prioritising other people's safety, but in his idolising of his sister Eve too. The shadow that Eve - ex-Marine and the only person in the book more impressive than Taro himself - casts over everything is a delight. All the space adventure romping is engaging and cool, Taro's voice is engaging too, and the aesthetic is cult SF-ish in a sweet way.
But I keep switching back and forth between 3 and 4 stars because the romance is the big emotional arc of the book, and yet the romance is the least developed part. (I mean, the arc of Taro's relationship with Eve is equally important, but Eve's not there for most of the book, so the Taro/Rafe romance has to step up as emotional arc no. 1) I like the idea of super-competent Taro falling in love with useless Rafe, but there was nothing to really show why it happened. Taro talks about how Rafe has an amazing skill for warmth and making people happy at one point, but the two of them are alone for the whole time Taro is revising his opinions of Rafe, and Taro isn't happy, so it's hard to see where he's getting that from? He just kind of flips an emotional switch and then never looks back.
Given the lack of feelings wrangling or any kind of emotionally satisfying pining, the fact that all of the sex is strictly off-screen hit my enjoyment of the romance harder than it would have otherwise. Essentially, Taro will tell us that it happened and it was fun, and that's it. There's barely even any show-don't-tell kissing. It wasn't that I didn't care about Taro and Rafe getting together at all, it was just a very skate-over-the-surface kind of caring. This book has a lot of surface. It's sweet and fun and a romp, which is a word I have probably used too many times in this review, but yeah.
Content notes: As mentioned, Rafe is an ex-sex slave/indentured rent boy, which started when he was pretty young. Taro also has some trauma in his backstory. There's not a lot of angst around either of those things, though. There's also consensual underage sex (Taro is not quite sixteen), as a heads up if that's a thing you don't want to read about....more
Post-apocalyptic YA. Ross is on the run from a bounty hunter. He hasn’t had anyone on his side since his grandmother died, so when he washes up in LasPost-apocalyptic YA. Ross is on the run from a bounty hunter. He hasn’t had anyone on his side since his grandmother died, so when he washes up in Las Anclas � a stranger in a haven of near-tolerance and a community of people trying to do their best in a lethal world � he doesn’t know how to deal with the friendship and kindness he meets in some of the people there. Some want him to stay � teenaged engineer Mia and ranger-in-training Jennie are the first friends Ross has ever had, and maybe they could become even closer than that � some are wary, and some are convinced his presence is dangerous. But when the bounty hunter catches up, an even more dangerous enemy on his heels, the whole town faces a fight for its very survival, and Ross will have to decide whether to keep running or choose people to stand with.
I liked this a lot. There’s a vibrancy to the world-building and the people that I haven't seen very much in post-apocalyptica: Las Anclas is a very real-feeling community with a lot of natural diversity of people and culture plus a large swathe of the town consisting of Changed people, with powers that range from small and semi-useless to revolutionary and accompanied by startling physical weirdnesses; and in the larger world, everything is very desert-bright and full of science fictional flora and fauna that can kill you. There are two romances that get POV time, both some kind of queer, and while there’s prejudice in the town along Changed/non-Changed lines, there’s a complete lack of prejudice around queerness, race and (Changed differences aside) disability, which is really lovely and soothing to read.
Just in general this book feels kind: cruel things happen, and there are definitely some real villains, but there’s this greater sense of people believably doing their best, and working on understanding each other, and the writers doing their best by their characters.
The action scenes are cool, too: both the training stuff (which, good training stuff is the best always) and the more serious fight scenes.
There are five POV characters, and the plot is a bit slow to develop as a result. Besides Ross, Mia and Jennie, we get Felicite the privileged and prejudiced mayor’s daughter, and Yuki the last refugee to come to Las Anclas before Ross. I liked both of their voices and they added valuable things to the world-building, but neither of them seemed to have very much effect on the plot, in this first book. I did feel that they could still have been important characters, and we could still have seen a lot of their arcs and emotions, while keeping the narrative with Ross, Mia and Jennie, and holding off introducing the other two POVs till the next book, where it seemed like some things were being set up for each of them to have greater plot relevance. Maybe there could have been more space for developing the Yuki romance in Book 2 as well? I liked what we got, and I would have liked more. But that would have been quite a different book, so who knows. I enjoyed it a lot as it was.
(Proof copy received from author for review.)...more
Fictionalised autobiographical turn-of-last-century Australian bush classic. Sybilla spends most of her youth in the soul-sapping drudgery of dairyingFictionalised autobiographical turn-of-last-century Australian bush classic. Sybilla spends most of her youth in the soul-sapping drudgery of dairying in a drought-stricken country. Her soul cries out for two unreachable worlds: the wild bush country of the remote ranch of her childhood, and the sophisticated world of arts, culture, literature and conversation belonging to distant cities such as Sydney. She knows, though, that be she ever so brilliant, the career she longs for will never be hers - being a woman prevents her from even seeking it, as an equally poor man might do. Then she receives an unlooked-for escape when her grandmother and aunt invite her to stay with them out on their ranch in the rugged and beautiful bushland she grew up in. But even there she feels the conflict between what she could do and what her spirit yearns for; especially when it comes to the matters of love and marriage.
I honestly can't tell whether I enjoyed this or not. There were definitely times it was a trudge and I was measuring how many pages I had to go and whether I could bear to get through them, but other times I was hooked. Sybilla is always an obnoxious, conceited, self-conscious and frustrating narrator, but she does know that she's these things, and it feels as though she's always trying to break through the prison of her own eloquence and awkwardness, to express what she really means, but never quite making it. And for all her self-pitying conceit, she's right: she does belong in a different sphere to the one she's trapped in, and the sheer misery it causes her to be cut off from what she yearns for strikes a powerful chord.
The most intriguing part of the book is her attitude to marriage. I'd heard that (view spoiler)[this was a book in which the heroine chose her career over marriage, but that's not what happens. The reasons she chooses not to marry are confused and contradictory, but almost more convincing as a result. More real? She is very young, and Miles Franklin was very young when she wrote this, and trying to work out why the idea of love and sex repel more than they attract you is pretty damned confusing. So Sybilla can talk about how her soul recoils from the very thought of marriage and her instinctive response to touch is to strike out, and then in the same breath she can talk about how the reason she doesn't want to marry this man, the one she thinks she might love, is because he's just not masterful enough, and somewhere out there is the true masterful man who would make her love him.
Seeing the way she sabotages and boxes herself in is painful, all the same. It's only knowing the success Miles Franklin achieved that makes that ending for her fictional self less crushing. (hide spoiler)]
The social politics in this book were also intriguing. Sybilla is a feminist, to some degree, and a socialist, to some degree. She cries out against many of the injustices of being a woman, while unquestioningly accepting many others. Her soul burns at class injustice, while also happily consigning all of her neighbours to peasanthood, because she believes that unlike her it suits them. She sees keenly injustices that she herself has experienced - sexism, class barriers and poverty - but she's cheerfully racist, sometimes upsettingly.
The only uncomplicated reaction I had to this book is that I really enjoyed the bush setting and description. It was vivid and beautiful and made me homesick....more
YA fiction. Tom Mackee has managed to cut himself off from just about everybody important to him, since his favourite uncle got himself blown up on thYA fiction. Tom Mackee has managed to cut himself off from just about everybody important to him, since his favourite uncle got himself blown up on the way to work in London. He's on the destructive bender that won't end, and his friends should have given up on him, probably; Tara Finke definitely should have. But when he winds up living with his pregnant aunt Georgie and working at the Union pub with his former best friends Francesca and Justine, Tom discovers he might not be as lost as he thought he was.
This is the sequel or companion to Saving Francesca, and I like Francesca best - it has a cathartic element that The Piper's Son, even though it's frequently more explosive, doesn't quite - but they're both about finding yourself and finding your way back home, and they both made me cry pretty happily. Justine here was instantly recognisable, but it was odd to see Francesca from the outside, and odder still to see Will, her boyfriend - odd and hilarious, as a friend told me before I read it, because everybody else recognises his complete lack of charm or charisma, whereas Francesca, of course, is in love.
Tom's own romance with Tara is ... kind of cool? I really like the dichotomy of Tara uncertain in love and Tara stomping around in combat boots as an activist; it feels real. But Tara isn't there most of the book, so it is harder to be invested in her and Tom. It did look as though Marchetta was setting herself up for another sequel about another member of the group, though, so we might get more of the Tom-and-Tara future story that way. I hope so!
Basically this book is Melina Marchetta back in her scrappy-Sydney-youth heartland, and that's the kind of story I love best from her.
Oh! This is also, I should say, Georgie's story. She actually gets half the narrative. It feels really hard to remember that; I guess Tom's voice is louder....more
**spoiler alert** Book 3 in the trilogy that started with The Demon's Lexicon. I loved this book, slightly scary levels of love; each new book in this**spoiler alert** Book 3 in the trilogy that started with The Demon's Lexicon. I loved this book, slightly scary levels of love; each new book in this trilogy has made me love the characters, and also the previous books, more.
There are things that I regret about the changes in POV-character with each book. There are things started in one book and resolved in another that simply can't be done as well from another person's perspective. The change with each book breaks the sense of continuity and drive to know what happens next, which meant that as much as I have adored all three of these books, I didn't hang out impatiently for each one the way I usually would with an unfinished series I adore. But I'm really glad the author did it this way all the same, with the price that comes with it, because I wouldn't give up Sin's book, or Mae's book for that matter.
In this one in particular, I'm fairly sure that seeing it from the inside this way is the only way I could have been sold on the Sin/Alan love story. The idea of it left me cold in The Demon's Covenant, and neither Sin (understandably given her small role in the previous book) or Alan (and I felt like more of a minority with this one) really spoke to me as characters, compared to Nick and Jamie in particular, but also compared to Mae. But seeing Sin and Alan recognise each other for what they were - the theme of both of them being liars and performers, and the other being the only one they don't have to feel bad about lying to because they can see the truth in it - being reminded of how craved but strange a thing love is to Alan - the way that Sin's pining was written - I really really loved it. This trilogy is not about romance, but Sin/Alan was my favourite romance in it.
What it's about, though, not that it's about one thing, but the thing it's most about, is siblings. For each protagonist the most important thing in the world, the thing that shapes their soul and their destiny and puts them in horrible danger and is worth it, is siblings. One of my favourite lines, which will probably sound trite out of context but I'll risk it, is Alan saying that love always costs more than you can afford to pay, and it's always worth the price. And because it's Alan and Sin talking, love has extra dimensions, but the love at the heart of the three books is the sibling bond: Nick and Alan, Mae and Jamie, Sin and Lydie and Toby. And I love the way that the sibling bond is so utterly different for all three, even though it remains the most vital thing. Sin who acts as guardian for Lydie and Toby, Mae and Jamie who have effortless closeness and a whole shared world of understanding and emotional shorthand, Nick and Alan who would kill or die for each other and need each other but for whom sibling love is the most difficult thing in the world.
That last point is one of the things that switching to Sin's POV for the end of the trilogy robbed us of, though, to a certain extent. Because it's Nick and Alan at the centre, and even more than whether Nick can be human enough to not be a scourge on the world and the worst sin Alan has ever committed, the tension at the centre is whether Nick can be human enough to love Alan - whether he can give back what Alan pours out in love and pain and selflessness. And what we get at the end, here, is Nick saying, of loving Alan, "Who knows? Maybe I did." and, raggedly, "I missed you." Which are both pretty powerful things from a boy who can't care properly and can't lie. In Nick's POV they would have been huge. In Mae's POV, with her closeness to and understanding of Nick and her lessons in being human, they would have still been a bit shattering. From Sin's POV they're just not as important as the other things that are going on: Alan being saved, the defeat of the Circle, the terrifyingly revolutionary changes in the Market, the brighter future for Lydie.
The resolution of the Mae/Nick romance didn't really work for me from Sin's POV either. Mae and Nick's love story was never especially romantic, and it did have some rather darling moments here ("We can do whatever boring thing you want"), and of course Nick not wanting to burn the world because it had Mae and Jamie in it, and actively wanting to get the pearl so that he can give it to Mae so she can have the Market, because she wants it, those things were pretty great. But their actual interactions, Mae and Nick's moments together, were robbed of most of their power from the outside; I couldn't feel the emotional stakes that were there in Demon's Covenant.
The Jamie/Seb love story ... we were never going to get to see that properly. We would have needed, if not Jamie or Seb's POV, at least a POV that could get us on that boat more than twice. So we didn't get to see it properly, and that's pretty tragic, but it did give me some warm feelings all the same. I saw you two making your lunatic pact to be evil boyfriends made up in droves for the fact that the lunatic-pact-to-be-evil-boyfriends scene wasn't very fun - and I really liked that Seb could see through Jamie when nobody else could. Seb's really interesting, actually, in that he's literally the only important character in these books who's actually weak. Mae and Sin both walk taller than they are, but that's their strength, and Alan and Jamie both pretend to be harmless but are secretly made of steel, even with their emotional cracks and frailties. But Seb is weak and doesn't really find his strength, and I think maybe by the end of the series, even more than getting over the gay thing, what he's made his peace with is that he's okay with that. Being weak was turning him into a bad person, when he was in the power of the magicians, but by transferring his loyalty to Jamie he can be more or less okay. It's not really a character resolution, and it doesn't answer all sorts of things about the future dynamics of his relationship with Jamie and the world, but in the absence of the Jamie-book we were never going to get, it's not a bad open ending for him.
I did adore the bits of Nick and Jamie's friendship. I actually had to text a friend in glee when Nick told Sin that they weren't friends because he already had one. In general though Jamie wasn't a highlight of this book, which made me a little tragic given that he was my highlight for the previous two. It made sense, given that Sin didn't especially care about him, and it meant that the main characters who were most important to Sin, Alan and to a lesser extent Nick and to a lesser extent again Mae, shone in the way a narrator who's absorbed in and interested by and delighted with and hurting because of can make shine, for the reader.
The plot was ... I don't know. Mae's strategic planning was much better in this book than in the last? The weakest point was in the things the other characters didn't tell Sin, and she didn't think to ask about. It worked that Alan couldn't know any plans, because that would let Gerald know them, but if there was a reason Sin couldn't know any plans, I didn't get it. The rest of the plot was fine, not the strength of the book but not letting it down either (the external plot, not the internal plot of emotional and character development and character relationship arcs which is the strength, or one of the strengths). But the artificial plot tension produced by nobody telling Sin anything did bug me.
A friend mentioned recently that she liked the way Sarah Rees Brennan wrote fight scenes, and I thought that I didn't especially remember them, but in this book the fight scenes, and the dancing scenes, really are the best. The physicality of Sin's POV, the things it's natural for her to be able to do, works splendidly.
I was trying to work out if I had a favourite book in the trilogy, but I don't think so: as I said, each one makes me love the others more. I think Lexicon is maybe the most accomplished, and the most starkly wrenching. Covenant is definitely the funniest and most darling, Mae and Jamie at the centre make it effortlessly lovable. And Surrender has the best love story....more
YA fantasy; sequel to The Demon's Lexicon. When Mae discovers that her brother Jamie has been secretly meeting with a magician, one of the cold-bloodeYA fantasy; sequel to The Demon's Lexicon. When Mae discovers that her brother Jamie has been secretly meeting with a magician, one of the cold-blooded killers who feed humans to demons, she doesn't even think before she calls the Ryves brothers. But when Alan and Nick roll back into town, something clearly wrong between the two of them, Mae's life descends blindingly fast into a web of crossfire between rival magicians' circles, demons, the Ryves brothers and the injured and angry folk of the Market.
I was a bit dubious about the idea of Mae as the narrator, although trying to be open-minded. The truth is that she's fantastic as a protagonist. I think the reason that she was one of my less favourite characters in the first book was that I need to see someone's vulnerabilities before I care about them a whole lot. Jamie was my favourite partly because he gets all the best lines, but also because he wears his weaknesses way out in the open. Stoically dark Nick I don't think I would have cared about at all if I'd met him first from somebody else's point of view, without knowing his frustrations and fears. Mae's still an incredibly capable person - in any other company she would be the most confident person in the room - but here, as the only person who can't fight or do magic, she's facing the novel and unwelcome experience of being a bit useless. She's just, she's so human, and prickly about her parents and plagued by nightmares and worried about her brother, and you can't help but care a lot. The scenes between her and Jamie, especially the early ones, are especially darling. I loved the "How did you learn to dance?" game.
I wasn't sure about the climax. (view spoiler)[I get that it was about giving Mae her power back, and having her be awesome, but I wasn't sure how awesome it all was. Her plan was pretty basic, she didn't do all that much to get it in place, and I don't quite buy the idea that only she could have done it. Even if Sin didn't have the initiative for it, it seems as though there was one other person who could have organised it, and more easily. (hide spoiler)] Maybe I missed something.
But this book is about the characters and their relationships much more than it is about magic and plans, for me. I love all of the characters and the ways they interact with each other so very much. Mae-and-Jamie best, but also Nick-and-Alan, the other sibling pair, and Jamie-and-Nick who are hilarious and kind of darling together, Mae-and-Sin, so delighted with one another, Jamie-and-Seb, so unequally positioned, and yes, Mae-and-Nick. They're not the love story of the ages - when one participant literally doesn't understand what love means, that's going to be tricky - but they're two terribly interesting characters making themselves vulnerable with each other in ways they would do with hardly anybody else, and still failing to understand each other. I really like the way they test each other - in the hand-holding scene in particular.
The one relationship that didn't work very well for me was Mae and Alan. It made me uncomfortable - not because I felt as though either of them should be with somebody else, but just. Something in the dynamic, whenever they showed affection for each other; nothing marked, I just didn't much enjoy reading it. Maybe I was supposed to be uncomfortable, given that they were both being some degree of dishonest with each other.
Even if I wasn't won over by Mae's plan, the twists in the climax were pretty devastating, and made me cry. And they leave us in a really interesting position going into the third book; this one is much more of a cliffhanger than the first. But again, I'm not all that excited about the narrator shift. I like Sin, and I'm sure I'll like her a lot more when she's the protagonist, but there are two particular relationships that are in really interesting places at the end of this book, and neither of them involve Sin. I'm not nearly as excited about the prospect of what seems likely to be Sin's pairing.
Basically, though, I read this pretty ravenously, and loved it....more
Still plan to pick this up again, but it feels more than a little silly to have had it in the currently-reading tag for two and a half years, so movinStill plan to pick this up again, but it feels more than a little silly to have had it in the currently-reading tag for two and a half years, so moving it over....more
YA urban fantasy. 16-year-old Nick and his older brother Alan have been hunted by magicians - the ruthless masters of demons - all their lives, since YA urban fantasy. 16-year-old Nick and his older brother Alan have been hunted by magicians - the ruthless masters of demons - all their lives, since their mother stole a powerful charm from a magician. Nick's mother, gaunt and mad, can't bear to even be in the same room as Nick, and Nick finds other people incomprehensible and generally uninteresting: Alan has always been the only true and sure point in his life. When Alan invites the irritatingly helpless sister and brother Mae and Jamie into their lives, then lets himself get marked by a demon - a mark that means death or demon-thrall if they can't remove it - and all apparently in the pursuit of a plan he won't tell Nick about, Nick's precariously steady world begins to unravel. In the beginning his only goal is saving Alan, without getting either of them killed or captured, but there's much more at stake than Nick knows about.
This is a dark-edged, tightly plotted adventure and family drama. It has heart and excitement and banter and wonderful secondary characters (Jamie the scared-secretive-witty boy who loves his fiercely protective sister a lot is my favourite by miles), and it also has a really fascinating protagonist. You don't feel close to Nick, exactly - he's impossible, disconnected from normal human emotions, and frequently frightening - but he's engaging anyway.
I knew to expect a major twist, which might have been why I guessed it early on, but the plot tension doesn't depend on that one twist, and I still had no idea what was going on. I especially had no idea what Alan was doing, and that mystery would have kept me tightly inside the story even if the characters hadn't. But basically there was no place to slip out of the story: it was almost too tight, and I was left feeling as though I'd wanted to loll around in the world and the character dynamics longer than I'd been allowed to. Which I suppose is the point of it being the first book in a trilogy: I'm supposed to want more. (Note that even though it's the first in a trilogy, there's no cliffhanger ending; this first book has a more-or-less standalone plot, and books 2 & 3 have different protagonists.)...more
This probably deserves the same star rating as the first one, I'm just less into established relationship.This probably deserves the same star rating as the first one, I'm just less into established relationship....more
M/M historical romance (turn of the last century); isn't listed as part of a series but seems to be set up for sequels. Captain Archie Curtis is not aM/M historical romance (turn of the last century); isn't listed as part of a series but seems to be set up for sequels. Captain Archie Curtis is not accustomed to subterfuge, and he is acutely uncomfortable at having accepted a country house party invitation under false pretences. But he also can't bring himself to ignore the rumour that his host bears responsibility for the devastating military accident that cost him the fingers of his right hand and the lives of most of his men. His attempts at investigation, however, are made more difficult by fellow houseguest Daniel da Silva: effeminate, witty, foreign, obviously queer, and altogether the most dislikable man Curtis has ever met.
This is pretty great: engaging and well-characterised and romantic. There's a very modern and unsavoury mystery and resolution in there, but most of the plot is drawing room chatter, late-night sneaking about, action and danger, with a really lovely extended hurt/comfort section occupying most of the climax. Also a couple of great female characters in plot-important roles - both rather familiar stock figures of the country house mystery genre but with, of course, a twist. I liked the use of recognisable country house mystery characters in general, actually, and da Silva in particular: when he's introduced he's such a familiar figure of the genre, the too-urbane, effete foreigner who will almost certainly turn out to be either the villain or secretly a deadly young blade playing a foppish part. But will never, of course, become someone you're supposed to like, never become vulnerable or warm or sympathetic.
Every time I read a K. J. Charles book (2 Magpie Lord books and this one, so far) I get unrealistically hopeful about the genre in general and spend an afternoon re-learning that most of what's out there is terrible. I understand that part of the fantasy for a lot of romance readers is that both partners be objectively and enviably desirable to everybody they've ever met, but god it's boring. All I want to know is that they want each other, in all their prickliness and individuality and fully equipped with emotional hangups, and Charles does that beautifully.
(I'm not sure the King Solomon's Mines crossover fic element added anything in particular, but it didn't especially detract anything either, so.)
Content warnings: some dubious consent that may also trip a particularly sensitive embarrassment squick (didn't for me, but hey), mentions of child sexual abuse (not of the protagonists), mentions of suicide. Specifics of the dubcon: (view spoiler)[kind of a fuck-or-die: characters have to perform sexual acts for a hidden audience to divert suspicion about their spying. (hide spoiler)]
Lol this was going to be a super-brief review. I'm so bad at brevity....more
YA fantasy. Only half of Nolan's life is his own. Every time he closes his eyes - when he sleeps and when he blinks - he falls into the head of a girlYA fantasy. Only half of Nolan's life is his own. Every time he closes his eyes - when he sleeps and when he blinks - he falls into the head of a girl called Amara, living as a silent and helpless passenger to her life and thoughts. Amara is a mute servant in another world, chosen for her healing abilities to protect Cilla, the exiled and cursed princess of the Dunelands. Amara's life is frequently a bleak nightmare - she has no rights, and her body is constantly called upon to bear the brunt of the killing curse chasing Cilla - but Nolan is convinced he has it even worse, sharing Amara's thoughts and hurts without being able to move the smallest finger to act in this second life that feels like his own, or to let Amara know he's there.
I liked this so much at the beginning. Everything about the premise is my jam, the thought-sharing and the communication limitations and Nolan's overlapping double lives and the two girls, one of them bound to protect the other and possibly in love with her, and the easy diversity which this book is absolutely chock full of: everybody is a POC, Amara is bisexual in a world in which that's so much the default it's not even a word, and she and Nolan both have disabilities.
And it's not really that it doesn't deliver, because I think the book probably achieved what the author set out to do. The character arcs are complicated and realistic, and the plot is mostly pretty watertight, with reveals at the right times which explained the things that needed explaining. It's just that it kind of left me behind. The developments of the relationships between Amara & Nolan, and Amara & Cilla, were sensitively developed with a lot of care paid to teasing out and validating the bodily autonomy issues and betrayal of trust and interrogation of power inequalities, but they didn't hit any of my emotional kinks. The soulbond between Nolan and Amara felt like it got less exciting as it developed. The main plot reveal about the Ministers explained what was happening but in a way that felt like it, idk, cheapened or reduced the story, a little. And the ending (view spoiler)[ with Nolan and Amara entirely cut off from one another's lives was what it needed to be, maybe, but also felt like the least interesting possibility. (hide spoiler)]
I didn't know how to rate this fairly, given all the things it's clever and sensitive and interesting about. In the end I just went with the most honest answer, which is: I liked it, but not enough....more
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