Surprisingly good! As somebody who didn’t like Ninth House/Locked Tomb, I’m currently expecting to not like any of the queer/lesbian YA, the more TikTok-viable the blurb, the worse. This one at least isn’t Lesbian Necromancers In Space, but I saw it as “sapphic dark academia Jekyll/Hyde”, and even though it’s not not that, I enjoyed it much more than I thought.
It has way more angsting about irrelevant stuff while there could be angsting about actual problems, but that’s just YA not landing with me being an increasingly old fart. I did think the angsting was realistic and well-written, and while there were too many hints at the actual mystery’s solutions, the book does well to focus on characters more than mystery, and it did the atmosphere very well.
Just to compare: I’m reviewing this a year after I read it, and while I had zero memory of the highly rated and lauded “Shadow of What Was Lost”, I can still easily recall this book’s Tower, and setting, and even some of the plot.
This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.
