First of all, thank you to Scholastic for an EARC of this book. This is one that I would love to add to my bookshelf. The cover is perfection. Literal perfection.  

 

I listened to this with a dark academia playlist on Spotify that made this even better. 

 

Dark academia is my vibe, add queer and I am all in. It is a YA book which I think dulls some of the darkness to it, though it’s still plenty dark. 

 

It starts with a prologue that takes place in the future and draws you in with some intrigue. Throughout the book I was trying to piece together how we ended up at the prologue and where we would possibly go from there. 

 

The world-building was well done, especially the way this secret society is integrated into the real world. The buildings and history within this novel were truly intriguing. I would have loved a map of the school. 

 

Throughout the story, you’re left questioning who should be trusted, even questioning if you should be trusting the narrator himself. I think this added to the overall feeling of darkness in the novel. 

 

I will say that the biggest downfall for me was the dialogue. Some of it was hard to follow, and at other times it was completely unbelievable, especially  with the amount of all caps that was happening. 

 

Another downfall was the fact that things seemed to simply be happening to the main character, rather than him taking action. I think this made the pacing a bit jumpy sometimes as his primary motivation was to be included, to belong (which at 16, who didn’t have this feeling), which left him being very passive. Also, everything seemed sort of easy for him. I expected much more tension and hoops to jump through while rushing the society. I think higher stakes could have easily remedied this problem, especially because by the time we get the high stakes it’s so late in the book. 

 

Overall, I had a lot of fun reading this book, and it was a quick a read.