One thing I can say about this book is that it surprised me. I went into it not knowing anything about it, so started out thinking maybe it was a kids' book, then revised that to YA, then eventually settled on adult. At first I thought it was going to be a straightforward fantasy about a girl who could speak to birds, but then there was science fiction added, and also a magic school, and a coming apocalypse etc. At one point I thought I had 3 pages left and couldn't figure out how the author would ever wrap it up...then figured out there was 103 pages left. So I can definitely say that I never had much of an idea of where it was going.

This could be good or bad. At times I was pleased because it moved into an interesting places I liked. At other times it made things a big superficial and I just couldn't connect to the characters very much. For instance, one thing that sticks out is the main characters' relationships with their parents. When they're young teenagers their parents seem objectively, cartoonishly bad in a way that it doesn't seem like they could have any relationship with them. But then as adults they apparently do have some relationship with them as parents. Likewise, especially, one characters' sister. It's tempting to think that the other characters just seem terrible because of the pov, but their behavior seems to be genuinely terrible.

So in general it's definitely a book that bounced around to different tones and ideals, without ever giving me something emotional to hold onto. Hugely emotional things were often dealt with with little emotion at all, or things set up as seemingly important were solved in a jokey way, but then there would be times when the narration almost seemed to be asking me to get emotional about some specific thing because that was something it wanted to be serious.