4.5 stars
This was cute and intriguing and had some twists I wasn't expecting that I realized I should have seen coming the whole time. I wasn't feeling the romance for the first half of the book, but also hadn't read the first book in a few months and so went in not feeling the investment I may have felt if I had gone straight from the previous book to this. The conversation they had with Crier wanting to learn Ayla like a book sold me, though, and I absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVED the amount of folktales they told each other with queer romances as integral to those stories. I loved having characters who just used they/them pronouns and that being non-addressed, even as sometimes it's nice to learn in detail about the way a society sees gender this time it was just cool to have it be a thing, with the human/automae issue the stigmatized existance/love rather than queerness or being nonbinary.