thank you to macmillan-tor/forge, tor teen, and netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

so i don’t know if this was my brain being dense, but i struggled my way through this book, barely following along with the sheer number of characters and storylines we followed. not only did it take a solid 40% of the book for me to even feel like anything was happening, after we were introduced to the easily 20+ characters. what was happening was honestly kind of boring to me. i’m totally fine with a fantasy book being slow as long as there’s intrigue in the story. and unfortunately, this just didn’t hav that to me.

i truly just think we were following too many characters, and our main three(ish) povs’ of the twins + valentina, i just couldn’t get behind any of them or their actions. they, unfortunately, just annoyed me so much with their motivations, their inability to communicate ANYTHING. it made me feel so discombobulated. then we throw in the other random povs, which for the most part have little to no importance to what’s happening in the story. and that left me feeling lost. like, at the final events, and i still can’t even figure out who’s who kind of lost.

now, am i going to read the sequel… i honestly don’t know. i think i need like 5 days to process what i even just read before i consider it. i don’t think i could handle reading about any more car crashes tbh (no seriously, how were there two in the span of like 100 pages??? what are even the odds in real life of that happening like 3?? days apart).