Incredible characters, gripping first half - slowly slips more and more away however the further into the book it goes with the slower the pace gets.

Honestly really love the concept and how the characters wrapped around each other and the story. I love the idea of language, but despite that part of it being what partially sold me on the book is was incredibly lacking overall. There was bits and bobs of it, but not really that much at all, and I don't even really recall any written Japanese?

Another underused part I think was Thaniel's synaesthesia. It's thrown in a couple of times, and has a couple important moments, but generally it was just a very background thing. I don't think I've ever read a book where the MC has synaesthesia before and I was super interested in that side of things.. only for it to feel like the author forgot about that point at times 😅 Also got confusing when the same descriptions of sounds were used by another character at one point?

The whole terrorism thing was very good in the first half, it felt like it was gonna expand out a lot more and involve a lot more... but then during the second half it just became, well, nothing? and then mixed in with another character which made it just confusing. And then the ending made it redundant a fair bit.

I want to like this more than I do, and there was I would say more fun parts than not. I just don't think it came together very well at all and feels overall incredibly disjointed. It's trying to be so many stories in one, and kinda doesn't really connect them all up fully enough.