I read Hall of Smoke for a buddy read, and if I hadn't I would have DNFd it. And it's sad because I feel like I should have loved it, especially the conflict between gods and the exploration of religious loyalty, two things I generally love in books. I think there's two reasons it didn't work for me.

First is the writing style. Hall of Smoke is written in a lyrical first-person narrative. I tend to love lyrical writing, but, for me, it just never worked for the story being told. The writing style reminds me A LOT of the style of Red Rising. But RR worked better (though not idealy) because of my second reason.

The second reason this didn't work for me was (and I don't usually say this) that it had fascinating concepts but poor execution. And I think Red Rising had better execution. The concepts in Hall of Smoke were super interesting and it was the concepts - as opposed to the physical worldbuilding - that was the true focus of the book. But so many words were wasted on physical details of the world, Hessa's feelings, and overexplained vague interactions and details. I think the writing made the book try to be an atmospheric book, but couldn't succeed because the book wasn't really about place. I wanted more of the gods and their actions and reprecussions, but I couldn't get that well from Hessa. While she didn't feel shallow or badly characterized exactly, Hessa felt like a extended example of why the gods are not to be trusted. And so I couldn't feel connected to Hessa.

I think Hall of Smoke tried to be too much. It just couldn't succeed (for me) to be atmospheric, lyrical, character driven, and focused on the repercussions of conflict with higher beings all at once and so it kind of failed at all of those things.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Samara Naeymi. I thought the audio was pretty good, though a little inconsistent at times.