content warnings: violence, murder, body horror, gore
representation: fat chinese side character


“All he cares about here on the edge of forever, is her. He does not want to die. Not because he is afraid. Simply because he cannot bear the thought of leaving her behind.”


This was like a season of Wolf 359 if Gabriel Urbina suddenly lost of all his talent. I genuinely have no idea why this was, and continues to be, one of the most hyped YA sci-fi series.

As you probably know, this is a book that uses mixed media format to tell a story about exes, Kady and Ezra, on the day that everything goes to shit. This book is nearly 600 pages but it could easily be condensed into half that amount. So many pages in this book are dedicated to useless crap that looks cool but doesn't add much to the story. It doesn't help that there are parts of this book dedicated to military reports and Not-Wikipedia articles which immediately make my eyes glaze over. Honestly, this book could have been told entirely through IM's and e-mails, and it would have had the same effect.

Almost every plot element in this book isn't bad, it's just entirely unoriginal. AI that starts to go bad, corruption at the highest levels, one of the main characters being a hacker, teenagers using weird slang even when they're having serious conversations, and on and on and on. Again, there's nothing inherently bad about any of this, but I just felt like I had seen it before.

The biggest thing that tanked this book for me, though, was the heavy focus on romance. This ends towards the latter half of the book, but for the entirety of at least the first 300 pages everything is overshadowed by Kady and Ezra's stupid love life. They broke up on the day that everything went to shit and there's so much time spent with both of them angsting over the other and pining over each other, and it is so exhausting to have to slog through to get to the semi-interesting plot.

I'm so glad this I spent over $20 on this and kept it on my shelves for nearly three years :)