Too focused on visuals and audio details, I prefer a conversation-heavy style.

I almost stopped at the second chapter because I wasn’t feeling it, but I tried to keep going for a bit. NASA’s plan makes no sense and the AI’s feel out of place. 

Not my thing.

I generally have trouble keeping track of names, and the dizzying array of point-of-view characters made it too difficult to continue, especially in combination with the slow pacing. It makes it feel like too many people are talking and nothing is happening. Even the very brief battle wasn't enough to help. I tried to read it for two months but it started feeling like a chore so I stopped. 

I was hoping for dragons, what I got was a book about not talking about dragons. The metaphor is clear, but repetitive and slow.

CITY OF SECRETS drops any coyness about being a magical cure narrative and goes for it almost immediately. Matt is dyslexic and struggles with reading, but in Talia he can read easily. It’s true that in Talia Luciano was always cancer-free, but somehow this feels more egregious to me, even though neither boy can take this “cure” home to England with them.

Ultimately I became frustrated with the strange pacing and the way this doubles down on treating the Manoush as magical, where Aurelio (a blind Manoush man first appearing in CITY OF STARS) is extra magical even for them. My original impression of the Manoush is they're the Talian version of the Romani, so their increasing role as oracles who pop in and have special powers plays into a bunch of real-world stereotypes.

I don't like Matt, I don't like how he treats his girlfriend. He spends so little time with her that I got a third of the way in and all I know is she's named Ayesha, he's jealous when she has male friends, and a little of what she looks like.

Quitting while I'm ahead, this was better as a trilogy. Georgia and Nicholas's storylines were specifically, definitively wrapped up in CITY OF FLOWERS, so them hanging around now feels so pointless. The scenes don't even focus on them when they do show up, it's just like "hey, remember characters you actually like? here they are!" I don't like that at all.

I tried for months to make it through this and I just can't do it. I don't like Rin, and I don't dislike her in an interesting way. The plot feels meandering and I don't want to read a book where I'm just trying to make it through. 

My understanding is that the arc of the trilogy is about how someone becomes terrible and willing to commit atrocities after having experienced them herself, but apparently that's not actually a story I want to read right now.

The plot is very slow, with a lot of time spent on the characters having the same worries over and over. I wanted a story about dragons, and instead it's a contemporary-ish teenage romance where some of the characters happen to be dragons but are generally human-shaped. The love triangle involves a teenage dragon (female), a teenage human (male), and a young adult dragon (male). I wasn't sure how big the of a deal the dragon-to-dragon age gap was, but once I got to a section from his perspective I found out he thinks of the teenage dragon as a hatchling, which makes his interest in her much creepier. If I'd been more interested in the plot this might not matter (that's not automatically a DNF reason for me), but this was one thing too many when I was already not engaged in the story.

The narration is witty, but I'm not enjoying the surreal style.

This has a particular blend of modernity and faery which I tend to not like generally but didn't realize this was going to be.