After working away at it for several weeks I finally finished this novel. It had been over a year since I’d read the first two and honestly I had forgotten how politically complicated and character dense these books are - it took me a while to catch back on to the backstory. I loved the first two and zoomed through them, but I struggled with this one. Partly the shifted character focus onto Joaquim and Mariana hurt it for me. Nice characters. Nice. Nice is a little (very) boring.