While I like the writing style this book was really frustrating to read. So many things don’t matter in this book it drove me nuts. The proclivity where actual important information is dropped casually and is often nonsense drove me bananas. Often times information the characters are privy to isn’t explained about another character until much later in the book. I think it’s supposed to wet your appetite until you get that information but it was done so frequently I just honestly didn’t care or was annoyed when dropped. Like hinting at Ernesto’s condition and then casually dropping it.

The plot felt really haphazard and there was basically no through line of themes, or they just didn’t hit and felt like they were tied into later, again casually and in passing. Made it seem like 75% of the book is just there for no real reason.

There’s lots of pop culture references and stylistic languages similar to The Magicians. Swearing and jargon and nerd references. But while Magicians does this to kind of ground the fiction in a way that says ‘this could be our world now and we wouldn’t know it’, there is no internal logic to this world at all.

There is some charm in how the world is expressed through the characters but it gets less charming and more frustrating about halfway in when it feels more like someone just wanted to throw some cool shit in without explanation, while swapping to the lives of the two main characters that, again, are pretty much just bloated with stuff that I GUESS would throw you off what the book is about and or headed? But instead just completely undermines any semblance of stakes or plot that the book attempts.

All this is to say, this book is not for me, apparently.