"I make no excuses, no denials, no apologies for what I have done. I know what I am." "I know what it is they say of me. What they call me in your history books. The Sun Eater. The Halfmortal. Demon-tongued, regicidal, genocidal. I have heard it all. And as I have said, we are none of us one thing. As in the riddle the sphinx asked of poor, doomed Oedipus: we change."

Pacing The pacing is quite slow; it does feel like an introduction to a massive, wide-reaching saga so it's not in a hurry to rush you into action. Hadrian's life spans hundreds and hundreds of years, so it makes sense that you can't just..skip to the heart of it. I personally decided to see it almost as a tv series and took a break a couple of times while reading it, everytime I hit a narrative point that felt like it made sense. And it did help though the 15 to 30% where my interest was definitely wavering. I stopped around 50% as well, and planned to do it a couple of other times and by then I was taken by the action and finished it in one go.

Writing I love the writing. I've seen people complain about the exact same thing I loved so much about it: we have foresight throughout the whole book. Hadrian tells us about his past and so we have his spoiling comments about how it all ends. Not just the big facts, like him blowing up a sun and ending a whole species (which we learn from the blurb, and the first chapter), but small things like meeting new characters and Hadrian letting us know, this is to be my best friend turned enemy, this is to become my beloved captain, those are the last words I'll ever speak to that person. That is a narrative tool that I particularly love. It never fails to feel both intimate and hook my attention if it started to weaken.

"You have heard, no doubt, that we have met as rivals and fought a duel for the command of our army. It is not so. No, I met the Phoenix at table one quiet evening in Borosevo. Bassander Lin. My last friend, my enemy. Hero of the rout at Perfugium, where Hadrian Halfmortal failed. Veteral of a hundred battles, knight, captain, traitor. He would be all of those things, but not yet. That night he was only a dinner guest, as was I."

Characters I've also heard people (who read it or wanted to) complain about how dramatic the writing is. Except it isn't. It's poetic, certainly, and the purple prose won't be to everybody's taste, but it's very much Hadrian who's dramatic, in the way only a teenager or an old person recounting their life can be, which is.. spot on. And it's openly aknowledged. Hadrian has been told, and knows he is, very dramatic. It's who he is. The boy read a lot and romanticizes everything he can and is full of idealism and that makes him immediately lovable in my eyes, because being thrown into the world hoping to find it sweet and being hit by the horrors is painfully relatable.

"Briefly I considered making a farce of the whole thing: throwing myself on the floor, beating my breast, and begging forgiveness. It wouldn't have helped, but the mockery would have made me feel better. Must everything you say sound like it's straight out of a Eudoran melodrama? Yes, Gibson, I thought. It does."

He's also massively priviledged, and arrogant, and self-absorbed and while he's disgusted by propaganda he's still prejudiced against things without realizing it; but he also tries very hard to be a better person and want the world to be a better place, and his decisions are sometimes shit and sometimes comes for pettiness and others (often) from a good place, and it all comes back to bite him in the ass anyway. He's deeply flawed, deeply human, and although I'm coming to terms with the fact that space setting is not really the thing for me, I'm really looking forward to see the curve Hadrian's life is going to take (I'm particularly curious —but didn't check in fear of a spoiler, if we'll eventually reach the present time, when Hadrian is writing that story, and keep going, and if we'll only catch up to him at the very end).

"When we think of War and her atrocities, we imagine that the unforgivable is prosecuted on the battlefield, in the heat and fire. It is not. Atrocity is writ by quiet men in council chambers over crystal glasses of cool water. Strange little men with ashes in their hearts. Sans passion, sans hope...sans everything. Everything but fear. For themselves, for their lives, for some imagined future. And in the name of safety, security, piety, they labor to found future heaven on present horror. But their kingdom of heaven is in the mind, in the future that will never be, and their present horrors are real."

"Poppy was undeniably beautiful—but not in the way the Welkish prized. Her skin was darker than theirs, her nose too big, her lips too full. He wondered if Poppy considered herself pretty, or if she felt disappointed every time she looked in the mirror and found she was not yet white."

Is there anything more frustrating than a 5-star-potential book turning out to be just barely 3⭐?

It has just fascinating, difficult and tragic themes, it could have done so much with it; alas it came out a bit dry and too juvenile for my taste. The irony is that so many books written by women tend to be shoved into YA regardless of its content, and for once that it isn't, it should have been.

It reads YA. The writing is quite dry and straight to the point (not to say that that's the case with all YA, ofc !), it doesn't go deep enough/stays surface-level, and spells out everything to the reader ( "Could he see the errors in his racist ways?" is maybe fine for a YA, read by teens building themselves and maybe benefiting more from a direct, spelled out approach; but for an adult fantasy, it feels too unpolished and graceless imo).

Poppy, despite being 23 is definetely super naive and behaving on the younger side, and pretty frustrating. It is the point, clearly, but her arc was not emotionally impactful for me to feel it

The plot unravels all too easily; entire life convictions and self-doubts are altered in the space of a few scenes; it's all too easy.

A shame really, because I loved the concept of Poppy, a poc woman adopted by white people (on her own land) and struggling between the genuine love she has for them and them for her and the condition of their love being her rejection of everything that makes her poc. Her language, her traditions, her faith, her people... And because she was adopted as a baby, it almost feels "easier" for her to let all of that go, because she doesn't remember what it was like anyway. Her desperate desire to fit in by being the best at what other white young ladies do, her own self-disgust by siding with people who see her people as infierior while wanting so very much to be considered "above/better" than that, her pain to know her parents might love her less if she was simply herself rather that trying to be white; adding to that the unbalanced dynamic between her people because of their caste system so even the ones fighting for their freedom from the colonizers aren't free of prejudice, showing how that could have planned a part in the colonizers getting their hands on the land... It was sooo full of potential!

Beside Hasan, I didn't really like a single character and tbh I found the feminine rage aspect AND the elemental magic aspect to be vastly underwelming. I don't think I'll read book 2.

"His embrace became uncomfortable with the sharp corners on his legacy now between them, the bones of his victims poking at her conscience. How could she love someone who had been responsible for so much suffering? How could he be so warm to her, and yet so cold to the plight of her people? Did he truly love her, or was his pride only for the civilized woman he believed he had created?"