I feel like this book had a lot going for it. A great setting, the love of Hawaii and it's culture as could be seen from the descendants of Earth, an intriguing heist, LGBTQ+ characters... it was cooking up something great. In the end I was disappointed that it was aggressively okay.

I really liked the Hawaiian flavor to it, the use of Hawaiian pidgin, the customs that carried over into space, it made the world feel so rich in comparison to so many sterile space-station settings. I also liked the romance tension between Edie and Angel, the childhood friends to enemies to lovers. While I don't think I would personally ever fuck around with someone who did to me what Angel did to Edie, even if it was for the greater good, love and lust is a funny thing lol.

What I think it really lacked was pacing. 75% of this book was just putting the crew together and Angel saying "I have a plan, trust me" and then not really revealing anything until 3 seconds before the heist — a very short and anti-climatic heist, might I add. Despite the crew gathering being so long, there wasn't really much in the way of found family bonds, which it seemed it was being presented as at the end (just having the cast reappear after disappearing for the last segment of the book was... wonky and really hamfisted I'm sorry).

I wanted to love this so much, but the pacing sucked, so many characters were flat and existed only to fill the "spot" needed for the talent they had. Liiiiike, did they really need anyone other than the computer girl and the fraud masters? I don't really think so. At the very least there could've been more time spent on character interaction outside of Edie having a rage boner for Angel. Idk.

P.S. comparing this to Gideon the Ninth should be a crime punishable by law.

I feel like I have so much to say about this book, and yet so little. It was the dark academia I didn't know I needed. Weird, confusing, shocking, everything just wrapped into a strange narrative that I couldn't have guessed was going to happen no matter how hard I tried. In fact, even if I tried to spoil this whole book right now, we would both still be confused, if a little amazed.

I found the main character to be so compelling. At times scared, at times angry, and others compassionate. She really reads like a teenager on the cusp of adulthood, who makes mistakes and chases after the things she likes with reckless abandon.

While I still cannot completely grasp how I felt about that ending, I feel compelled as if by magic to read the second book. How the hell is this going to work?! Damn.

I wasn't entirely sure what I was getting into when I started this audiobook, since I hadn't read the blurb and picked it up solely because one of my favorite booktubers spoke highly of the series. But I am SO glad I did.

While the story revolves around the idea of the supernatural world finally coming to light, it feels more realistic than other books I've read with the same theme. There are cover-ups, rivaling factions, the occult -- all vying to try and keep things covered up or bring things to light.

In the midst of all of that is a cast so large and interconnected that at times I thought I needed to pause the book and try and make a list of the characters and how they're related to one another and like, who was dead and who was alive. And honestly, I think that is my only complaint about the book itself.

The narrator, Dion Graham, did such a fantastic job, though. Especially during the action scenes -- he read them so succinctly, breathlessly, pulling me in. It was so good.

Did I cry while reading this book? Yes. Did I cry multiple times at different points of the story? Also yes. Do I cry easily? Unimportant, but yes.

From page one of the first book in this trilogy I knew this would only end in tragedy (somewhat lessened by the epilogue but STILL) because Vanyel is a tragic hero figure of lore in other books set further into the future. But I did not expect it to be THIS SAD AHHHHH.

Anyway, I feel like I'd like to give it five stars, but there was just one short section that included brutalization and healing from it that was very fast and somewhat pointless - it felt like unnecessary trauma porn-y in a series of tragedy lol.

Mercedes Lackey has been devastating me and building me back up since 2007 and I don't think that will ever stop. 💛

I really appreciated the depth and breadth of the research put into this book. I was expecting the usual interviewees over death: the morticians, the funeral directors, the grave diggers, but this delved into such unique situations as well: bereavement doulas, disaster response teams, executioners -- I was surprised by how much death touches several industries, or rather how many industry are centered around death.

If you're sensitive to child death, particularly infant death, miscarriage, and stillborn birth, there is a rather long section that details these things, as well as a thematic tone throughout the second half of the book where the author keeps touching on her experience with a dead baby and her visceral, traumatic reaction to it. I admit I did cry a few times during these segments, but a little part of it was... kinda cathartic? Hard to explain loll.

Otherwise my only real complaint is that there are times when the author is rather biased in her opinions, particularly the ones that come off as 'morally superior'. This was probably the most highlighted during her interview with the prison executioner, who, from what I can recall, was also the only interviewee she mentioned being Black. There was a lot of the author inserting her opinion about his job being immoral and that he was only creating a facade for himself when he considered himself free of guilt, since it was the Government that ordered the killings and not he, himself. Don't blame the tool mentality -- which the author very obviously did not agree with. It wasn't until the epilogue where the author seemed to finally understand where he had been coming from, but it felt too little, too late, and it left a bad taste in my mouth.

In all, I found it really informative and unexpectedly thorough. There are a couple careers in there that I think I might look up some more in depth books on, too.