3.75⭐ "A hero who has never had a bad thing happen to him isn't a hero—he's just spoiled." "So, this is what? A character-building exercise?" "What do you think life is? Everyone gets their share of pain."

This has a really intersting storytelling style. A 1st and 3rd person pov, both told by people conversing, and recorded (with footnotes) by a third party. And because those 1st and 3rd pov tell the story of the same person, but at different time of their lives, that makes a grand total of 3 timelines. It can easily get either overwhelming, or annoying when you're really into the action and keep getting pulled away to another chapter in a different time, but both timelines have a very good pacing and it makes for a surprisingly fast read. I think that my problem is that those timelines changes, and every chapter on top on it, completely drowned

1. the build up of connection between characters. We kept being pulled out of a group dynamic to be shoved back into the past, then getting a few conversations and then back to the past again. So I never felt a deep connection either towards the characters, or between them.
2. the emotionals beats of the last leg of the book. When characters that were separated in the oldest timeline finally meet again, I couldn't feel emotionally stired because they were just together in the previous chapter/previous timeline. At some point I even got confused at a reunion before realising that, oh yeah, technically they hadn't seen each other in X time, because I'd just read about them having a conversation in the past a few pages ago. Let me stew in the emotions, I'm begging you.

The characters feel real and unique, with strong personalities, and Kihrin, as an MC, is interesting and funny. His whininess pissed me off a fair bit at first but then he IS 15. The narrative voice of each narrator is really good, with a lot of funny apartés, be it comments from Kihrin and Talon as they tell their tale, or the footnotes interrupting to state how wrong the characters are at all times or to share details that sometimes aren't even important to the story ("avoid that goddess's baking, trust me") but build a rich lore. The story itself is full of such wonderful details, like a harp only playing beautifully for musicians she loves, creating a really vibrant universe. The fact that everybody is lying to everyone is also really fun because you're never sure that you have the right version of whatever is happening. It does get confusing the more the story progresses.

Questions are spread out everywhere, small enough that they don't hinder the understanding of the action, but so many that you lose track of them, setting up for great reveals. Or it should anyway. But the story tries to shove so much into the time it has, it becomes hard to digest. It tries to do so much, to scale itself up so fast, that you have no time to let the information sink in and really grasp it before more is piled on; and with everything being connected, mixed with different timelines, and reincarnations, and changing names... well that makes a big old mess. It's so complex, broad and ambitious, but too condensed in my opinion. There's plenty of moments that I thought should have hit me harder because they were big reveals, but because twists and info kept being dropped on you nonstop, it became just one more of them. I think you need lulls into the rhythm of a story, both to take the time to build relationships and connection, and so new info has an impact, and that was dearly lacking here.

Overall this book felt like a cake with all your favourite flavours but when you get it out of the over, it comes out way too dense. You still eat it, and it doesn't taste bad per se, but it feels more and more stuffy to finish and you can feel an indisgestion coming before your plate's empty.

As a side note, there was way too much rationalising of incest for me. Not even just on a cautionary tale type, or from the "bad guy side" only. We have "good" characters speaking of incest as not a big deal (though I'm guessing she meant "not a big deal because nothing sexual happened". Still.), and even once described as potential "romantic", which was frankly disturbing. Kihrin is the ONLY person saying how weird and gross it is. Idk, the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.

"If you asked me today if there was a single action, one event, that might have changed the course of what followed, I will unfaillingly point to this: the day you broke into that Kazivar House and let curiosity bid you stay, when a wiser man would have fled. But you did not, and so I call this this beginning."