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This is 100% a YA book.

The prose is like an out of control bush that needs to be trimmed so we can see the story.

The scene where Nita negotiates to save the house while Lanie is whacked out on her own powers is a great example. A good book could show Lanie in an altered state without obscuring what the scene tells us about Nita and the conflict facing the sisters. This isn't that book.

This book is making me miserable but I accidentally bought it on Amazon trying to download the sample so, here I am.

This book is definitely YA. I don't care what anyone says, I'm this far in and it's YA. It's written like YA, it has a YA protagonist and a YA set up. This is NOT an adult novel. I am pissed.

Also, it's tedious and overwritten going for something Neil Gaiman-y, maybe. Nothing has happened yet.

I can already tell this novel is going to be insufferable in places. Especially the prose. I love myself a good piece of lyricism in the narration, I do, but unlike poetry, it has to make sense and actually add something. "Insensate planet". Injecting words that just sound good is just irritating. Still no idea what Gideon is actually DOING and why.

I'm starting to be mad that I paid the full indie bookstore price for this thing. I wanted to support a bookstore, but it's turning out not to be worth it. I'm just sort of bored at this point.

Slow moving. It's taken 65 pages just to get to the main plot, and even then, we've just grazed it. Claire is weirdly generic, existing to explain things, mostly. She's a character of color, but there's no indication of it until someone describes her "nut brown skin". So far Leto and Brevity are more vivid and this feels like it's supposed to be Leto's story at the moment because he's got a personality.

Things are finally happening, I think. The relationship between Sherin and TiCara still doesn't make sense. There's lots of POV switching that just makes the story slow down. I hope things get better because I'm really disappointed in this novel so far.

Takes a third of this book for anything to happen, and it's little things so far. Sex scene w/ Sherin and TiCara had consent issues (Sherin was likely not in a state of mind to give good consent. TiCara even considers this but went ahead). TiCara and Sherin have yet to have a real conversation. Most chapters are 90% extraneous introspective narration telling the audience stuff we already know. This book is boring.

Oh god, Naasir has severe boundary issues. I thought for a moment, maybe not when Andromeda snapped at Naasir for small unwanted touches (like grabbing her braid) and he went polite/civilized. Nope. Even when she outright says "I don't want sex, I took a vow of celibacy", Naasir keeps rubbing himself against her. Consent is gonna be an issue in this one. Ugh.

I like Naasir so far. Visceral and simple. It's refreshing to have a viewpoint freer of emotional clutter than others have been. I like that he thinks, so far, that his mate is hiding from him and his take away from all the couples around him is that mates just find each other and that his should've just popped up by now but hasn't and that's annoying. Obviously, we know she's about to, but it's still fun to read.

Not well written. This needed an editor to trim it down excessive narration. The attraction between TiCara and Sherin feels like something the author declared rather than an organic draw toward each other. There's no real reason TiCara finds her to be hot, she just is. Because the author said so. The ex-lover dynamic with Elia feels more real, but unless Elia plays a big part later, too much time was spent on it.

So far the attraction between TiCara and Sherin seems...pasted on. One thing that frustrates me about romances sometimes is that the protagonist never seems to have a reason or any specific attraction. It's just "wow they're hot, I wanna fuck them". Which means so far Sherin has the personality of lamp. Hoping that'll change soon.

YHL is just getting lazy. Jedao-Cheris amounts to the author having Jedao just never tell Cheris what's up for no reason. Nerevor is semi-sympathetic. Feels like the author just wanted to turn a first person shooter game into an SF novel. Now we're just blowing away civilians like it's funny. YHL can pretend to want to show the horror of it but THAT much focus on the killers and not the victims tells the truth.

Yay, more words that mean fuck all. This should be a tense, climactic part of this novel, but there are no stakes. Not because there isn't something to win or lose, but because I don't care who wins or loses it. There's no one to root for. I don't care who dies or if Jedao completely takes over Cheris. I'm continuing with this book so that when I fully review it nobody can shout "but you didn't finish it!" at me.

YHL undercuts everything that might be exciting about this particular stretch of the book by refusing to explain about calendars. I suspect the author has no clue. Also, there is a decided lack of human warmth or connection in this book. There's no one to trust or even really root for. The hexarchate seems like a bunch of assholes and we know precious little about their enemies. It's the battle of I Don't Care.

More stuff is happening. Mostly everyone second guessing each other and then themselves. The word-salad barrage disguised that Cheris can get boring. Jedao is interesting. There's lots of intrigue but it's not intriguing. There's a boring duel with "calendrical swords". I've resigned myself to the fact that the author just isn't going to explain that EVER. It's just YHL's magic word. It means nothing.

It's improving. The barrage of contextless scifi words slowed. Plot finally started. Conversations now have some meaning. Still don't get the calendrical thing. Guess it's just a grim techno-fueled struggle over following the Joke-a-Day desk calendar vs. Hot Firemen of Milwaukee monthly on the wall. "The Eels employed the misprinted Dilbert system. Such heresy," said Mikodez, archly. TELL ME OTHERWISE AUTHOR.

The reading is slightly easier now. The author has stopped inserting twenty different brand new undefined, context-clueless, world-specific terms on every page. Plus, we're getting to the actual thing this book is about. So far, I like it and I'm interested enough to keep going. Note to self: warn people in reviews that chapters 1-4 are going to be bumpy rides. Still don't know what a calendar is, though.

Struggling with this one. Characters in the book live in a world where "calendars" are so important people go to war over them it's the main thrust of the plot, but almost 30 pages in and the author can't spare two or three sentences to hint at why THEIR "calendars" are not the same as the things that hang on your wall and tell you what month and day of the week it is. Ugh. I'd been looking forward to this one.