I don't even know y'all. I think that if you have a super homophobic person in your life that you wanted to indirectly educate and they were super into gory revenge action movies this could MAYBE help them wake up a little bit but I also wouldn't hold your breath about it and you 10000% could not stop here.

The thing is that this is so thoroughly a straight, cis male perspective that if it's trying to make a commentary via that frame work I think it fails to do that, and if it's just the way this author writes (this is my first by him ((also my last)) so I don't know how his other works compare) it's failing to make any other point meaningfully.

There are quite a few moments where a side character tries to impart a moral lesson, but they totally fall flat in the carnage of easily escalating violence, the frequency of that violence being directed at queer people, and the constant onslaught of misogyny. While our 2 dads do some amount of reckoning with their failures it ultimately doesn't hold any weight because their response to the murder of their sons so entirely centers themselves. This vengeance and "justice" isn't for the boys because it's not in service of or in line with the boys. They remark several times that if their son was still alive they wouldn't approve - so how the cuss are these actions "for" them?? They aren't. These dads are solely serving their own egos and pride and the consequences are HIGH and there is absolutely no thought about the people they are murdering are also sons? Or the long term aftermath of this pursuit?

I know that we're not supposed to like these guys, and Cosby knocked that right out of the park, but I also just didn't like the tone. It's so crude and foul and graphic and I swear if I never hear about someones "nuts" again it'll be too soon.

And finally, the cherry on top - after a shoot out, the leader of the bike gang is taking inventory of the damage done and one of his crew is severely injured. He briefly ruminates on how unlikely survival is for this crew member and that if he DID survive, he for sure would be disabled for life. So he kills him. To spare him the agony of living as a disabled person.

And thus I won't be reading anymore Cosby.✌️

compared to the first book this one is a tad disappointing. but its not so bad that i hated it, i just think it drowned in too many POV's and skirted around the subject of the main conflict, thus flattening a conversation that could have been had about real world problems that affect us here and now on Earth. this avoidance of the topic also served to obscure the character development of the titular character. since we never really find out exactly how much he knew about how his father's company operated in the first place, and we don't ever look the problem in the eyes, the change in him is kind of told not seen and feels hollow.

i really wish we would have kept it to the same 3 POV characters, mayyybe adding the main antagonist Corvus. and i really wish we had more time in Teo's perspective and actually gone into detail about what is mined on Mercury, what tech it benefits, etc. i also don't like the direction the author took with Corvus, it kind of spiraled into something less realistic and more cartoonish. i disliked his and another character's ableism towards the only disabled character that i know of in the book (someone who is even on Corvus's side) because it served no purpose. i also am cautiously side eyeing the mentions of Corvus not making eye contact. disabled villains are too old and stale we can do better. i think Corvus's actions are too inconsistent with his primary grievance and i wish it hadn't been so. the book would have been a lot better with a more sympathetic villain.