So there's this episode of Steven Universe where Steven and Connie get into an argument because Connie hated how their favorite book series ended with a big wedding that spent ten pages describing the cake, but was weak from a plot standpoint and didn't tie up the loose ends. Steven is kind of ashamed and embarrassed until Connie points out, "Of course you loved the wedding and the cake, you big softie."

This is a book for people who love reading ten pages about the cake.

The town of Snow Falls is clearly some kind of magical space where everything works out just right, where everyone will feel happy and accepted. Every plot beat feels so worn and familiar, every romantic moment so full of exactly the expected dialogue, that it feels a lot like rereading or rewatching something familiar. That's clearly the intent, for it to be cozy and comforting. So Anna's current boyfriend is a jerk and Maryam's family is driving her crazy? Wow, if only they were forced to slow down and enjoy endless domestic scenes of multicultural bakeries, sitting in front of the fire in cozy inns, and rediscovering artistic passions just in time for a big production number at the end of the book? And what if the men in their lives really saw them for who they are and one was a movie star and the other was a childhood crush?

The plot? Unbelievable. The dialogue? On the nose. The vibes? Too many halal marshmallows in my hot cocoa. The protagonists? Disappointingly straight. But as comedian Rekha Shankar once said, sometimes you just want to see a brown girl get kissed.

Actually my biggest gripe was the way that all of the Indian and Muslim cultural words were always explained. What, you mean to say your intended audience doesn't also need to be told, Christmas, that beautiful day when Christians celebrate the birth of their savior. While customs vary by region, this is typically celebrated first on Christmas Eve, with a religious service at the local church, and then with the exchange of gifts on Christmas morning... or pancakes, a favorite all across Canada, usually made by quickly frying a mixture of eggs, flour, milk and butter atop of a flat top... Like I'm neither Indian nor Muslim, but I've grown up quite adjacent to those communities and feeling like moments were stopped to have my hand held and explained still felt surprisingly othering. Yet I can acknowledge a lot of folks don't have my level of knowledge, so I think a funny way to fix this would be to just go into painstaking detail about the ingredients and customs of everything.

I wouldn't go out of my way to read this again, but I'm not sorry I spent my time. The relationship between Maryam and her sister reminded me so much of my mom and her sister it was a bit scary tbh. It's a silly holiday book, it doesn't pretend it's anything else, and for that, it's just fine.

I truly had so much fun reading this, even with the wild speculation from our main characters idc! It was a book I could not put down in the most genuine sense. If anyone’s interested, I think they should go in blind like I did, knowing nothing about what was in store, and just go along for the wild ride. I really appreciated how accessible it was, which made it an even quicker read. The supplementary pictures/floor plans also really added to the investigative feel of the work. I am definitely going to be reading more of Uketsu’s writing in the future!

"If heroes don't exist, then one can only be a monster."

I'll start off by saying that I hate writing this review because I was super hyped about this release all year and follow the author on IG and had lovely interactions with her, and was overall 99% sure I'd love it. I did not. Any other book, at any other time of year (there's only a few days left before january and I'd like to round up my reading goal to 90) I would have dnf'd it.

It was a highly anticipated release because it's themes I love (a FML so morally grey she finds herself becoming the villain, how people, and children, are used in war, revenge and its consequence on one's soul, magical/martial school..), and you can tell the author had a vision, but the execution was not there for me.

The writing The prose was not bad per se, but I kept noticing my eyes skipping words; I think it's very.. wordy, while not describing much. It's all about imagery and vibes, but I didn't feel anchored to the actual place. It's very IG-quotes worthy but so much so that it stops feeling real and just felt overkill. Plenty (and that's an issue both in the description aspect and in the plot aspect) is mentioned and never explained. She'd mention some mythic creatures flying around and I was left feeling like "what are those? Do we know them? Do they matter? What are they doing here? Why are we mentioning them and then never again?". When it got to the magic system, that habit got so much worse and I found it overall very poorly explained. We would have stances mentionned, or attack styles and names, have incense and oils used without ever telling us what they do or why they're important. There would be an action scene interrupted by a "his affinity, Afflicter, to manipulate the currents of the planets through the angels" and then go back to the action as if THAT made any sense.

Conversations, especially important/emotional ones, had a really odd and unnatural flow. I kept wondering why X and Y would answer this with that.

It's a 1st person narrative (my enemy), but feels like the author wanted or couldn't help but write as if it was 3rd person, so we end up with a lot a monologues, explaining things (military techniques, myths) or going deep and poetic (a LOT of monologues over-explaining her feelings in very grand ways and more IG worthy quotes).

Characters I found Khamilla massively frustrating. I think the beginning of the story doesn't serve the purpose of her arc. Althouhg it opens to her not being accepted into her tribe, she IS accepted quickly and receives love, from her tribe and mother, then from her half-brother, so it feels so unjustified to have her be so blindly loyal and dependant on the emperor when he treated her so poorly; and this dictating so much of the goals and motivations of the rest of the book felt a bit empty to me. She also kept making really cowardly decisions while convincing herself that she was making herself stronger; and I get it, she's broken and all fucked up inside, but those particular decisions (memory related) made for a really off flow to the plot. And even by the end of the book, she keeps having those big realisations and then her following actions are even more fucked up and I was just not following her mental gymnastics.

I liked a couple of other characters (the children, Yabghu) but once again, good potential dynamic, clearly a vision there as well, but we never actually dig in. The only time a character grabbed me emotionally was Arezu in chapter 37-38, and that did get me a few tears, which is why I can't go below 2.5⭐.

"My life is simply a mistake in the cosmos. It was made for sacrifice."