There may still be 4 months left in 2026 but I already know this will be the best thing I read this year. Might be the best thing I have read in the past 2 or 3 years honestly, and I absolutely know why it won the Hugo award this year.

The prose wasn't just devastatingly beautiful, the characters weren't just complex and deeply flawed while being lovable and heart-wrenching, but this book stands out from so many of the other massively popular fantasy books making the rounds on bookish internet to me for one main reason. This is one of the shorter fantasy novels I have read this year, and it quite literally contains MILlENNIA of story within those pages. So many novels today it feels like the authors write pages and pages without saying very much at all, and their books feel padded and full of filler words and scenes. I will never get over how many lifetimes we live with our characters inside only 300 short pages, Alix E. Harrow is a master of her craft just for this alone. You can write with just as much impact in a few short sentences as you can with many paragraphs.

I didn't annotate or tab/highlight this book because my copy has pretty sprayed edges and I didn't want to mar them with tabs sticking out. But honestly, thank god I didn't because I swear I would have gone through packs of highlighters and tabs. I usually like to highlight my favourite quotes so I can find them easily later, or favourite scenes, but I swear every third line and every chapter was my favourite. I finished the novel this morning and already want to re-read it again. This book may be TOO good because now I feel like all the books I read after it for the next few months will just pale in comparison no matter how much merit they have on their own.

The themes in this book are also just so poignant and topical right now. Aside from exploring the depths we will go to and sacrifices one might make for love, this book is also very much about art being a government propaganda tool. Aside from a stunningly tragic yet optimistic love story, the biggest message I got from this book is to always question stories we are told, and specifically "who does this story serve?" As we live through an era of rampant misinformation and truly evil governments leading world super powers of nations, having this in the back of our mind adds a much-needed lens we all should consume our media through.