This is a book I really expected to like, which makes being disappointed with it even worse. Sweeping, political fantasies with Sapphic characters and unique worldbuilding tends to be something I love, so I figured The Sun and the Void would be a hit. Instead, my feeling about it are really just "go girl, give us nothing," which is a bummer! I just didn't care about the characters, or the world, or the central conflict and had no investment in the plot until basically the very end, and even that was pretty lackluster. I felt like the text often time skipped past the most interesting stuff--the actual violence and the building of relationships and things like that, which made it really hard to care overall. 

I didn't even have any huge gripes or complaints with this one (which at least would've been more interesting). The prose was perfectly serviceable and nicely descriptive in some sections, and I feel like the plot and characters really could've been compelling. I did feel like the ending was the strongest section, with beautiful descriptions and some really good action that wraps up nicely. I did enjoy the incorporation of animal traits into the different fantasy races, and the sense of history within the world and the different political aspects. 

Overall, though, I just couldn't root for the characters the way I wanted to. Reina and Eva's conflicts could've been really compelling, but they would up feeling too similar and without a super clear sense of growth for either of them. In particular, both major romance subplots I just could not be bothered with, they all felt pretty rushed and like we hardly got to see the characters actually bond at all.

For Reina, it felt like she just instantly had a crush on Celeste, and then we just time skipped past almost every chance for them to actually interact, where we're supposed to buy Reina's full devotion to Celeste when it's just not convincing at all? And the same is true with Maoir, it felt like they went from being at odds to really caring about each other so fast, and while I would say that Reina was my favorite character in the book, I just couldn't get why Maoir liked her so much based on the actual interactions they had??? It just felt like a really clumsy love triangle that wasn't actually achieving anything thematically between two underdeveloped romances. Then, of course, the love triangle is resolved in a truly baffling way when Celeste pretends to reciprocate Reina's feelings for some reason, is fantasy racist to her out of nowhere, and then is revealed to be her cousin??? All at the very end--the cousin thing in particular really felt like a way to just resolve the love triangle without any actual sense of conflict or character growth for either of them, since obviously that's not going to happen. Eva's relationship with Javier was actually a little bit more developed, at least, but the downside of that is that I loathed Javier. This is definitely a personal bias, I just really, REALLY don't like broody sadboys and take a LOT of convincing to care about straight romance, and he's the picture of a broody sadboy. He's just a real asshole, super fantasy racist to Reina and manipulative of Eva, and him being cursed does NOT make me any more sympathetic towards him for either thing, I really wanted Eva to just kick his ass so he could stop being a major character, but alas.

Ultimately, I feel like this book aimed for a lot of complexity in its protagonists that it just didn't really achieve, with a very slow pace that somehow didn't really develop any interiority or conflict between the characters well. In many ways, it felt a bit more like YA fantasy than adult fantasy, when I definitely have a preference for the latter. It has so many things I like and a really interesting, in-depth setting and magic system, but it just fell so flat for me and I wasn't invested in the characters at all :^/.