I liked it fine, but I have no desire to finish the series. I know there are a lot of Poppy War stans, and if you are, please don’t come for me, it just wasn’t my favorite.

Things I liked: being inspired to learn more about parts of history I didn’t know much about, since lots of things in this book are based on real events, like the Nanjing Massacre. War strategy (for some reason I’m into this). Shamanism! And I liked the first half where Rin is at school.

Now on to the parts that left me wanting more. The latter part of the book felt too rushed but also like a slog. Rin is a really unlikable hero/antihero/MC who makes rash decisions out of anger. The relationships between characters didn’t feel believable. I didn’t know enough about the characters introduced in the second half of the book. And I just don’t care enough to read another two books to see where this story wraps up. I’ll probably just google it.

This is super creative fantasy unlike other fantasy I’ve read, so if you’re a big fantasy person, you’ll probably really like it. I’m not a huge fantasy person. I like it but I mostly just dip my toe in the pool of fantasy. I would realllly love to watch this as a show, but ultimately the reading experience, while interesting, just wasn’t compelling enough for me to finish the series.