DNF unfortunately, E-ARC received from NetGalley.

I meant to add this as a DNF a long time ago, but I got too busy.

This writing style comes across as both smarmy and self conscious in a way I found to be wildly grating. The dialogue didn't match up with time period it was placed in, and sounded awfully juvenile. I'm also very, very sick of being quipped at, or having to read truly terrible flirting. Ultimately, despite the legions of reviewers commenting how dark the novel is, I just simply do not trust the author to tackle the purported themes properly. Both from the shallowness I get from the prose alone, but also trying to reconcile the "queer normative" world building. You can't have no homophobia and imperialism, because that's not how those concepts work on a basic structural level. There was also a lot of telling and not showing, references to past key events and bonding moments between the characters, all of which serve to pad out what is simply a book that cannot seem to allow itself to be that deep.