not bad, the characters are decent and the uncharted island plot line is interesting enough. some disorganized thoughts:

the beginning is incredibly clunky for some reason

I miss fc yee’s attention to detail and the depth of cultural representation he would go to

malaya’s death was genuinely unexpected and unfortunately I guess her and gyatso will never go anywhere

a past avatar showing up near the end of these books is getting a little predictable at this point but it still works on me. i think the reason given that kyoshi stopped prolonging her life is interesting and i enjoyed seeing how she had flaws until the end

the main annoyance i had with this book was that it doesn’t really do any development towards the state of the world we see in atla. in fact, it kind of strangely starts there already— gyatso hates the fire nation for reasons I don’t understand, since they haven’t really done anything yet, and sozin is already evil, which just feels like a missed chance for an interesting corruption arc and makes his friendship with roku not that believable and the betrayal we know is coming a little more predictable