Ok. I'm here. I finally crossed the finish line crawling on my hands and knees. I slept on it and honestly I am still having difficulties parsing my thoughts on this.

I was extremely excited for this and I think I made too many assumptions based on the blurbs and taglines and all that fun stuff to the point where it really hurt my reading experience A LOT, which is what contributed heavily towards my rating. This is why:
1) I would peg the setting as a fantasy steelpunk sort of setting, but make it fantasy steel instead, which was GREAT. I loved that aspect so much!! Not so much 'punk-rock' because it felt too western for that?
2) It's advertised as a political call-out, however I was expecting more political commentary - or at least more than: "capitalism kills and is evil but socialism is worth dying for". I was not expecting it to lean more into the constructs of religion and nepotism and really it got super muddled at that point as to what the author's intention was with this.
3) I could see where the comparison to Gideon the Ninth came from in the sense of the frenetic prose that almost seems to riff on the English language. Do I feel like it's on the same tier as Muir? Not really, but it's unique enough to keep interest.
4) The comparison to The Princess Bride is absurd. This book isn't even a romance, unless you consider an obsession with a dead girl romance. Either way it doesn't have the easy humor, Inigo Montoya character, or really anything that made TPB unforgettable. And you can't label anything that's vaguely second chance romance as being similar to TPB, that's just silly.

Anyway to try and sort my thoughts I'll just make my list:

Pros:

⛏️ The beginning of this book! Wow! What a bang of a start! I was hooked almost immediately! You've got labor strikes, death, escapes, banditry, train robbing!!! Almost a wild-west vibe filled with comradery and lesbians! It was great!

⛏️ The varying degree of identities of the characters. Not just gender, which comes up a couple times, but within the scope of lesbianism and thoughts of dysmorphia/dysphoria.

⛏️ The last 10% of the book. Look, with all the religious allegories going on, I was expecting a Jesus Has Risen moment. Glory and all that! I was not ready for the hatching of sentient, hive-mind metal kaiju. Plus, the very last sentence was perfect. It made the second person story-telling angle turn the entire book into a repeating cycle, which would tell the creation of the world, industrialization, and the end of the world over and over. It was a nice touch.

Cons:

⛏️ World building in general. There's a lot of it, but it feels like it's all in the wrong places? Or too little or too much all at once? There is no real balance. Example: At like 80-ish% I found out there are TWO MOONS in this setting. This feels more important than an offhand after the book is almost over?? But I do recall, after a lot of thinking, that a character mentioned a moon phase of "waning gibbous" towards the beginning, which would indicate one moon, right?? There are a lot of religions, I think maybe... 4 or more distinct ones? Only 2 of them do I have any general idea about what they are about and even then that's being generous. I think the author has a very good idea about their separate distinctions and founding myths and beliefs etc, but it doesn't really come across the story with any real clarity.

⛏️ Confusing cast of characters. As in their names and who is who. Everyone has at least 2 names, with the exception of only a few characters in a cast comprised of ugh idk somewhere in the 20s? Example: "Perdita Perfection" being called Perdita, Dita, Perfection, and sometimes even Princess Whatever Her Last Name Was - interchangeably, sometimes within the same sentence. Some characters change their names from childhood to adulthood and MC doesn't bother making the switch and uses both names whenever bc why not.

⛏️ Mid-book slump. I feel like something was lost just at the halfway point. There is the very important plot point that is supposed to rocket Marney into the second-half of the book to accomplish her page 1 goal, but it suddenly goes flat? Marney just sort've stops doing things and there is a massive focus on graphic sex scenes (that's cool but where did the plot go??). The prose loses the edge that the first half of the book had, like the author found it difficult to keep it up? I almost DNFed several times between 55% and 91%.

Thank you to Netgalley and Kensington Publishing for a copy of this book.