edit: after giving this book some more thought I dropped it to two stars, and I feel like I'm being generous there. like I say below, wordbuilding is solid and queer diversity is great. Hiro is fun because they're at least a little interesting. Everything else--very meh. Book 1 remains fantastic and full of promise, but this was a letdown. I won't be reading book 3.

goddamn things got real bad real fast for our protags here.

Even though there's only four, there's so much happening that I want to talk about them each:

Hiro!
My baby. Light of my life. My favourite character since book 1. They're so messy and complicated and beautifully written. How they wrestle and cope with their altered appearance, how they want to present themselves, everything around them being nonbinary was perfect.
Hiro is written with so much care my heart hurts. I adore them. Their pain was so real and relatable, and their complicated family situation is one many of us will recognise ourselves in, I think.
They're also the most interesting character in terms of personality. Much less of a do-gooder than the others, which I'll get to.

Astrid!
Girl... what happened to you... Astrid started out so strong and then she just kind of... slipped into a manic chaos. I will say -- I was annoyed and disappointed at how her relationships with Lily and Eden turned out. Eden just demanded Astrid do something about all the bad things the Agora was doing and refused to see that in order to reach their end goal Astrid had to compromise on how to get there by making deals with the Aunts. imo...she abandoned Astrid. Shouldn't she know by now how the system works?? That Astrid can't do anything without power?
And Lily... man...

Spoiler

her betrayal (if that's what it was??? it remained very unclear) was just sad. I thought the whole idea of Astrid was to join hands with her other Sisters to overthrow the system.

All in all, yikes.

Lito!
I gotta be honest, I don't have much to say about Lito because I don't really think much about him. Writing this I ask myself: who is he as a person, really? Do I know? Does the book know??
It felt like he existed as just a guy who cares about his sister

Spoiler

and sacrifices himself, I guess?

Nice to see him being described as aro so casually, though.

Luce!
I really didn't like Luce. She lacked consistency, and the way the book described her doing art was utterly cliché and lacking any depth. Luce likes her life and her privileges, yet goes out to do illegal graffiti with other college kids and when she almost gets caught it's all "noooo why did I doooo this?? :("
It then takes about five minutes for Castor to convince her to join the rebellion, and her whole mentality does a 180 flip to hell yes I am a warrior girl now.
I was willing to give

Spoiler

their romance a chance, but it was happening way too fast and was clunkily written. Reminded me of bad YA drama. as for their breakup, and Luce accusing Castor of lying to her (very dramatically, dear lord. no emotional maturity to be found here) I was just like... ??? I get that threatening the Icarii with basically a cancer virus can be shocking, but girl, please, these people have been the subject of hatred, oppression, and torture for literal decades. tbh I would've high fived Castor and said "hell yeah that's my babe right there!! nice job".

In general I found the writing trying too hard at being deep and meaningful, and ending up sounding dramatic/theatrical at too many points.
It felt like the book was, like its main characters, rather naïve and lacking depth, despite a very solid worldbuilding in place with complex sociopolitical struggles. The slow glide towards war was portrayed very well and realistically.
But almost every mc had the exact same character voice, and the exact same moments of "I won't let this injustice/bad thing happen any more. I See now. I will fight, and die!! for a good cause" etc. With four main characters this quickly became very repetitive.

I have to give kudos to the variation in lgbtq characters! Nonbinary, genderfluid, aro, poly, etc - my heart is happy. And the worldbuilding is genuinely well done and interesting. Just wish the characters were written as well.

UGH the discord in the reviews made me curious to read this and I guess now I gotta read the last one but man this is messy. I'm gonna be honest, I don't even know who the title refers to—I'm guessing Lito? As the cover seems to be a random guy with a sword. No idea why Lito would be the one to title the book.
I have lots I could say about how nonsensical the worldbuilding is (one of my fave things is that they have guns so advanced they can't fire in close quarters) but it's truly not worth the effort. the character who was sorta my fave became a war criminal :/ flop

Fucking incredible.

DNF at 55% I may come back at a later date but I really wasn’t feeling it