The Final Strife has an interesting premise, a wonderful world and is backed by decent writing but falls short in all other aspects that made this a chore to read.

We enter a world whose people are segregated by the colour of their blood: Red (Embers), Blue (Dusters), Translucent (Ghostings). Embers are the ruling class, Dusters are the poor drudgery and Ghostings are essentially slaves who are dismembered in order to keep them subservient.
The Dusters concoct a plan to swap out Ember babies with their own Duster babies, in order to raise the Ember child with the mindset of a Duster and take the system down from within.

While this sounds like a great plan, its not executed nearly as well as it could have been, namely because of the glaring plot holes and the weak characterisation.
Why not find sympathetic adult Embers to aid your rebellion? As a consequence, those Embers could just raise sympathetic Ember children and have them takeover. Better yet, they could just make the change themselves! Theres another issue but that would include spoilers so i'll have to omit.

The biggest issue with this whole book is the characters. I (and the others in my readalong) had no emotional attachment to any of the characters who were a mixture of immature, annoying, childish and just plain stupid. Theyre meant to be 20 years old but act like children so it made nothing read true about why they acted they way they did.
Sylah is struggling with addiction which i didnt have much empathy for until the last few chapters and this was mainly because her initial motives werent set up correctly.

Anoor is a terrible caricature of an overprivileged white woman who discovers the error of her racist ways as soon as she gets a Black friend. It was all very cliches and shallow and i probably disliked her and her naivety the most.

The two main FMC as well as the secondary male characters were all a bit of a chore and if not for the ease of the writing - again which was good - i probably wouldnt have finished it.
The best of the bunch was a Ghosting named Hassa who was the only person with any real agency but even that was at a minimum.

There was some decent LGBTQIA+ rep but also some that felt a little forced. The sapphic element was fine but where others had been injected into the world seamlessly, the relationship between the two FMCs didnt feel as natural.

It sound contradictory to say someones writing is good while hating the story but while the author has a talent/skill for putting words together, the actual story she was weaving left a lot to be desired.