Now ima give KC their A for effort but baby this was not it. I tried. I tried to push thru and keep the focus but there were so many things that were either distracting to me as a reader or just was too much. 

What we love to see…
- in ANY Callender book you’re gonna get a cast of queer characters, love to see it!
- super intrigued with the initial magic system and the world, the concept of alchemists and all the connections to power and energy and life essentially was a really cool broader umbrella
…that’s it🥴

What ground my gears…
- the amount of repetition of said energy and connections to alchemy🤣 every other chapter…I only got 12 chapters in damn but it was soooo repetitive and with the repetition it didn’t actually progress the story. We didn’t gain any additional info 12 chapters later
- there truly was no world building, we were in this world and then at a school and Ash was a grounds keeper and and that’s it🤷🏽‍♀️
- I think more info about this book everyone wants would’ve been good too
- now…*insert headache*…take it how you want, ignore me for all I care…I could not quite grasp who the characters were. I got Ash, cool. Then there was other character (literally can’t remember their name) and that in itself made it difficult for me to connect and focus because as a straight female I just accept and see what is put in front of me or brought to my attention and I just vibe with it. But this character was confusing the hell out of me with the fluidity. I tried and I will keep trying to understand and do better as a person but in a story where I need to keep not just the magic straight and the world together I have to at least know who the damn characters are and at one point I literally thought we had 5 different people in the scene and I just couldn’t. 

Off my rant…I think…this author does AMAZING contemporary writing! Love all of their other books but this was a huuuuuuge miss for me😭and I’m so sad about it!!