You know what? I had fun. There. Yeah, it’s bleak. Yeah, I can’t defend why I had fun with this one and not with, say, the similarly murdery Murderbot or the also try-hard narrator of Gideon the Ninth (though that one was more obnoxious!), both of which it’s fairly close to. But I did have fun, and that’s that.
While reading, I wrote a friend: “this is one of the things that will be lost to my memory: it’s annoying while I’m reading it, but looking back I’ll only remember the better parts”. Yup, that did end up happening!
(Not sure I had fun enough to read the entire series, mind – it is very YA, wannabe-edgy, moody broody teenager stuff. Much of the wide spectrum of minority representations felt forced in a way that reminded me of Wayward Children. But yes, still fun, and maybe it’s just that I’m a sucker for magic schools.)
This book is part of the 2022 Backlog Incident.
