**I was provided a physical ARC from the publisher in exchange for honest review.**


Akemi Dawn Bowman explores what it means to be human in The Infinity Courts. After Nami is murdered, she finds herself in Infinity, a place that was once dreamed by humans for consciousness to go after a physical body has died. However, it is now ruled by an artificially intelligent sentience that is tired of playing servant to humans. Nami must take a side between the humans and AIs, for it does not seem that coexistence is possible.

I had a difficult time with this book. I could tell, objectively, that the construction of the Infinity Courts themselves was interesting. I could identify characters that were ones I would (very late in the book) come to root for. But a combination of factors led to me just feeling a bit mediocre about this book. I found that Bowman chose to be very fast-paced straight out of the gate, which is a common strategy to build a reader's interest. But I didn't know enough about Nami to particularly care that she was murdered, and her responses were not ones that endeared me to her. So the fast-pace into a slow build of information was kind of wasted on me.

Nami, as a character, was understandable and spent 90% of the book if not the entirety of the book in a moral dilemma. Which, for me, made her extremely unlikable. Particularly the middle of the book, which really centers around Nami trying to work through her thoughts. I was just frustrated and impatient. Which is not to say her characterization was bad; it was very believable. I found her wishy-washy and unwilling to take a stand, which I dislike in real life as well. Therefore, I was not pleased to be spending the book in her perspective. Which meant when the pace did slow down, I was that much more annoyed which was compiled by the repetitive quality of the running moral dilemma theme.

There were a multitude of other characters that were introduced as side characters, but we really didn't get to see much of them beyond what role they were meant to fill. It really seemed as though the side characters were simply there to bolster Nami's purpose rather than being developed in their own right. Which meant that my usual strategy of becoming invested in a side character to carry through a book with a main character I dislike didn't work for me here.

Objectively, Bowman is exploring very interesting concepts through a world that sounds pretty cool, but I don't think I was able to appreciate it as much as I might have had there been more character development. I would still reasonably recommend this book to other readers as I'm certain many other people won't encounter the same issues I did.

DNF @ 20%

Thank you so much to Simon & Schuster and Netgalley for providing an e-arc copy in exchange for an honest review

Unfortunately this just did not work for me. There were glimpses of things that I really liked, and I've heard the end is a wild ride. But I'm not enjoying the process of reading and don't want to push through 300+ pages to get to the end only to give this an unfairly low rating.

1. I found the world to be really convoluted and confusing. Which makes sense since it's an abstract afterlife, but it was so hard to follow. I could not wrap my head around where they were going or referencing (even using the map). And it felt even more strange when the MC would reference locations like she knew what and where they were moments after hearing about them.

2. But more than that was the world building itself. This entire first 20% was just one massive info dump of world building. Within the first couple pages, the main character enters Infinity and is confronted with a group of strangers who just start defining words and giving her a brief history lesson. It just didn't work.

3. But the thing that actually made me put this down was Nami's inner dialogue. This is written in first person, which I normally enjoy (and it often helps in world building since we can learn along side the main character) but it did not work here. Since so much focus is put on describing the world, we never got any insight into who Nami is beyond basic facts. And her inner dialogue is just a stream of explaining the themes of the book. I didn't like the extensive exposition detailing her feelings and the themes.

While this premise really intrigued me and I desperately wanted to love this, sadly it just didn't work for me. I don't want to push through and it give it an unjust rating since I know this isn't going to be something I love.