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I struggled a bit at the beginning of the book, especially with the world building. It didn’t seem to flow naturally, but rather it felt kind of choppy. We start off with our MC, Amaia, who seems to be an alcoholic enjoying a day off. We then are introduced to a character and immediately jump into action with another character having been harmed. From there we see the MC as this shaken up, but rather cold & detached General that is meant to be running this apocalyptic compound and she discovers that someone has betrayed the compound & her second in command/partner was gravely injured because of this betrayal.

But our MC lets this traitor go, without interrogating them, without any sort of violence. Which almost plays at odds with a lot of our MCs inner dialogue. Especially as a General who cares so much about the safety of her people, it just seemed like a very out of character thing to do.

Then the story vastly slows down as the MC enters a period of grief that lasts for a couple of chapters. I think this heavily hurt my own interest in continuing & the overall progression of the story. It felt like a lot of showing rather than telling of who Amaia is & what Jax meant to her, who he was. Amaia also many times called out her own selfishness for not acknowledging the other people that were harmed by Jax’s passing, which made her character difficult to connect with, it made her seem like a bad leader & friend. By the 12 chapter mark I still had too many questions about the world: what do all the different magic types mean? Do some people have more than one? It seems like they do have more than one? What are Pansies? Why are they called Pansies? What mutations do they have? Why do we have so many POVs? What purpose to these different POVs serve?

For a debut novel, I think that this premise is incredibly interesting & I believe this author has potential. I do look forward to seeing how this author grows with future works!