I have never in my life wanted to be able to rate a book higher than I am. I loved everything this book was doing. I loved the lyrical prose, I’ve written down so many examples of fantastic wording. The worldbuilding is unbelievably creative, very whimsical, it felt like pulling out all the most fun ideas that you could imagine and seeing how they’d go together, it was so rich and vibrant. I also love the genre of music this book leans on and Alex Jennings’ Spotify playlist for this book has been on heavy rotation for the last two months (yes it took me this long to read it)

All of the characters were great. Not just our protagonists (though Brendy is a star and should have her own spinoff), but the side characters as well. Perry’s story arc was really interesting. Child protagonists are usually fanging for it (adventure) but I found how terrified and resistant he was to the idea of doing magic to be so fascinating, it was like he was too grown up to be able to be a proper naive child protagonist. I also loved Casey and Jaylon, and Casey’s whole arc.

But like. God. @Farron in their review called it a connective tissue problem and I’m just going to steal that wording because yeah, the connective tissue just was not there. Every idea in a vacuum was amazing and interesting with so much potential, but there were just so many ideas that it was impossible to execute most of them in a satisfying way. Or even in any way, to be honest. I came away with still more questions, but those questions were ‘wait, who? what happened? did Jet just… die?’ (that last one was a joke in case you read this book and start freaking out that you had forgotten a whole character named Jet, which is entirely possible.) This book was so long and there was so much, and yet I feel like somehow the author didn’t have time enough to explain everything in such a way to make the story make sense.

And like. It makes sense? I understand what happened, but I’m a little confused about how we got there. It almost feels like an abridged version of a much longer novel, which… I’d guess it’s slightly over the 100k word count limit for fantasy debuts, I’d bet the author had to cut a lot more from this story in order to squeeze it to meet market standards. I think either a lot of these ideas needed to be cut (which I hate, because again, they’re ALL fantastic), or else this should have been a longer series. Even the parts I thought worked well were held back because they weren’t given enough time to properly shine amongst every other thing that needed to happen.

(complete tangent, but I’ve never seen or read The Phantom Tollbooth, and based on the title alone I assumed it was like a 1940s noir film and I was like wow, Perry has cool taste. Only when I looked it up just now did I learn it’s a kid’s portal fantasy. I don’t know dude.)