smashmo's reviews
295 reviews

Really enjoyed the later half of the book but the first half took me a long time to get through. The ending was OK but there was some cheesiness and

the resurrection trope happening that I didn't totally love. Also..what was with the ending for Keris? I wanted to learn more about her and we got almost nothing. Ugh.

Anyway, a mostly decent end to the series. 

Listened on Audio

AHHHHH I loved this book so much! I can't even bother to read critical reviews because I don't want to hear it, I'll just argue internally about how wrong they are. I care about January so much and everything she is going through, and there are some great scenes between the two love interests that just felt more relatable than in any other romance I've read. (I've read about 6 total my whole life so take that for what its worth lol).

I laughed, I definitely cried (Chapter 17/25 sent me), and just all around a really great time. It's a romance. Nothing crazy or unpredictable here, but all of it just felt so good.

Listened on Audio

Helene Aquilla is my wife.
Elias is alright.
Laia is ehhhhhhhhh.

It seems like everyone gives this book a 4 star or higher, so I'm wondering what I missed. The over arching plot about stealing eggs is meh, but once our characters get outside Leningrad, then things get more interesting. The relationship between the two main characters is sweet, and they have a great bromance; Kolya's optimism and liveliness is a treat.

What really detracts from the story here is this 17 year old male virgin gaze. There is just too much of an obsession on getting a woman naked in these pages. Of course I'm aware that this is very accurate to how young men think and behave, but I don't want to read it for 250 pages. I'm also aware that this sort of humor is used by the characters as a coping mechanism for dealing with all the tragic things they are experiencing, but I still wish it had been handled differently. Just not my cup of tea.

OOO Wow! Easily the best book in the quartet! The final battle was around 200 pages long too, which was so much fun. Many of the characters we hated got their dues, and almost everyone you would expect got a somewhat happy ending. All in all a great finale. Star docked because the beginning of this book wasn't super memorable for me, and while enjoyable, things are fairly predictable. 

Best book in the quartet so far. Though it took me a while to get through this one due to a reading slump, whenever I did pick it up I mostly enjoyed it. Just really bored when we followed Camlin's POV, but everyone else's was really interesting. We had so many memorable scenes in this one, and the ending really leaves you hanging. 

Read mostly via Audio

Better than I expected for sure. I don't love the romance, I just couldn't buy it from what I was given in this installment. Also the repetitiveness of Laia's thoughts got a bit on my nerves. Over all, though, this was so much fun. I love the brutality of the world, great characters, and interesting plot. 

Read mostly on Audio 

I am really swinging and missing with Audio books lately. I really didn't enjoy the narrator much here, especially when he would pick up the reading pace for the "intense" paragraphs. I can see why he made that choice, but it wasn't for me. Towards the end I picked a physical copy from the library and enjoyed the story much more that way. Just too bad it was at the end. 

Had I read this all in physical copy, the rating would have probably been a 3 or 3.5. It was fun to visit all the different islands in this world and the magic system was somewhat interesting. However, the overall plot was just kinda meh. I didn't mind the episodic adventure style, but I didn't love it either. Character wise, Ged was just OK for me, and we didn't really get to spend much time with anyone else; I was never able to get as invested as I would have liked. 

 Ohhhh, I so badly wanted to be in LOVE with this book. But here we are, and I am so torn on how to rate it. There are so many good things in here, but the negatives, though few, drove me crazy.

I absolutely loved what this story was about and how we got to examine one big event affecting many different people in many different ways. I eat that up! And the people we explore range from people close to the death of the young man, to people who didn't even have contact with him. I especially enjoyed following the parents in their grief. As someone who is not a parent, let alone one who has had a child die, the fact the author could really make me empathize with them in a way I didn't realize I could was amazing. I'm sure many other reviewers agree that this authors prose is beautiful; purple to the extreme. On top of all that, it was really interesting to learn in a little more detail all the steps that go in to an organ transplant.

Now for the terrible. As a character driven reader, I like knowing someone's backstory. But I also appreciate that backstory being relevant. There were a couple times that the backstory just wasn't needed at all. Example: I did not need to know how/why that one guy ended up with his girlfriend, and the whole thing seemed to just lead up to "she's an actress, but he performs in a different sort of theatre." We could have gotten the same message in the author's same stylistic way with much less words.

And speaking of less words...the run on sentences really REALLY got to me. At first I thought it was really interesting and fun, but the more I read, the more annoyed I was at having to decipher the meaning of the sentence. I often found myself re-reading whole pages and skipping big chunks just to get to the over all meaning behind the words. I think this is what drove me to insanity and why it took me so long to finish this book. I was enjoying the events as a whole, but the delivery made me cringe at the thought of picking it back up.

I might come back to this in a couple years and re-read it as I now know what to expect, and will probably enjoy it more