This is going to be a long one.

I think I’m done with this series, at least for a long time. This book was very frustrating. There were elements I loved, but by the last third of the book I just started hate reading.

I hated Hadrian in this book. He was young and naive in the first book, but he was at least a little sympathetic. The biggest problem I had was Hadrian’s moral outrage at anything slightly different or mechanical. There were paragraphs after paragraphs about how disgusted he was by the interesting new things he came across. It sucks because I really liked the actual world, but his constant negative and repetitive reactions to it were unbearable.

Also, he just is an asshole. It’s pretty bad when every argument he has I’m always rooting for the other side, because Hadrian comes off as a whiny brat who wants to do what he wants no matter what. I worry that Hadrian is being set up to be a special little boy who is the chosen one and the ending solidified that thought. I also noticed that most characters don’t give him a hard time, in fact it feels like their sucking him off because he’s just so handsome and smart. It would help if Hadrian, the narrator, commented or disavowed his younger self, but he’s too busy smelling his philosophical farts and then wafting them in our face.

The writing was way too flowery, usually was pointless and did not go anywhere. If I read the word disquiet one more time I’m going to tear out my eyeballs. Anytime old Hadrian started meandering in his narration I groaned and prepared for him to jerk his brain off onto the page. The constant references to classic literature were also too much. We get it you’ve read Dante’s Inferno.

Petty shit incoming
I’m not one to disregard art because of politics, so these gripes are just things I noticed and don’t influence my score. I had enough problems with the writing and narration style to begin with.

I don’t know the author as a person, so take this with a grain of salt. Something felt off in this book that wasn’t present in the first. I have just come off “The Lesser Devil” so I read the blurb before hand stating that Ruocchio was a Catholic and thought cool you don’t see many religious fantasy/science fiction authors. I was glad it didn’t bleed into the first book and there were even a bunch of gay characters! Then I read the story. 

It featured a group of heroic Catholics that were real cool and smart and they saved the day. It was pretty eye rolling, but the story was decent and it was self publishing, so who cares? Then I started reading Howling Dark. I started to notice that Hadrian started referencing Christianity way more than the first book. I looked into it and found out that the author reconverted towards the end of writing the first book, then it all made sense.

I thought the sequence was cool, but  it didn’t help that the Painted Man was an evil, effeminate extrasolarian in makeup that flirted with Hadrian. It felt like a weird dig at drag queens. Also, was weird that Hadrian kept calling them it. That’s another thing why does Hadrian get so upset when people call the Cielcins anything other than it. I know they are aliens, but it comes off as a weird dog whistle.  Not to mention that paragraph were Hadrian disavows sex changes for some reason? 

I got to bring up poor Switch, the good gay, who got shafted in this book for doing the same thing that Hadrian did to Jinan. I’m being conspiratorial here, but it felt like now that he’s Catholic he’s got to write out the sympathetic gay character. He didn’t even introduce any other gay characters (who weren’t disgusting monsters, Hadrian’s words not mine), which I found especially weird because there were so many in the first book. Also, don’t reference Jordan fucking Peterson in a sci-fi book.

Time to get off my soapbox, I might be completely off base here, but too much shit lined up. I might pick this series up again, but I doubt it. I hated my reading experience towards the end and contemplating DNFing a few times, but I powered through. I think I’m going to do a reread of the first law series to get this taste out of my mouth.