I am so sorry to all the people who loved this book, but like This Is How You Lose the Time War, I really did not understand this hype around this book—which was especially disappointing because The Night Circus was a 5-star read for me. But this book is really, really not for me.

Unfortunately, this book was lost in too much abstraction and I didn't understand anything that was going on. Nothing made sense to me because nothing seemed real. I am really just someone who can't read or understand anything that isn't concrete (thanks autism brain!), which made this book a slog for me to get through. By the last 100 pages, I was basically counting down the number of pages that I had left before I could be done with this book. A lot of people had compared this book to Piranesi, which I loved, but there was a concrete story behind Piranesi that did not really exist here, and I really struggled to find my footing. Piranesi also explained everything in the end, whereas here, I felt like the readers were left to drown in the starless sea. I was hoping that all the side stories and hints would come together in the end, but almost nothing actually felt like it came together or was explained.

I especially disliked the last part of the book because everything felt like a fever dream where nothing was real. There were doors that led nowhere and disappearing mirages and seas made of honey and bees living in dollhouses and I was just like what? The story as a whole was sort of aimless already, but that issue got even worse by the last part of the book. Nothing that happened in the last 100 pages of the book actually made any sense to me. I couldn't tell you what happened even now, a few minutes after I finished reading it. This is another book that runs only on vibes, and I hate books that don't give me anything solid to stand on.

There was also almost zero character development in this book. Could I really tell you anything about any of the characters? Nope. Did the "villain" really have a lot to do with anything in the end? Not really, she sort of just...died. What about any of the side characters? Couldn't really tell you much about them either. There was a "romance," but it made no sense and seemed like it basically came out of nowhere, so I wasn't invested in that either. The only character I sort of liked was Kat, but I imagine that was because she was the only one who was much more grounded in the "real" world.

I gave this two stars rather than one only because I could appreciate that at least the first part of this book really was a love letter to books and stories, and there were some really great quotes that I enjoyed about the importance of stories. Otherwise, I will leave this review off with this because I truly have nothing else I could say about this book since I don't even really know what happened: I fucking hate purple prose and pretentious writing. For a book that is about a love of stories, there was really no real story to be found here.