Don't like the style of prose, very flowy and heavy on vivid details that don't feel grounded.

Lost interest in the contemporary portion of the story.

I generally like this author's work but I just didn't get into this one.

I hadn't liked the love interest in the first book, so switching perspectives to that person and a very altered version of the previous protagonist resulted in a book where I dislike both of the point-of-view characters. That alteration fits the plot, so if you liked the first one this might work for you, it just didn't for me. I can say it starts to deal with the fallout of the protagonist's actions in the first book, so while I don't know how it ends up, I can confirm that it didn't resolve it quickly nor cheaply.

It’s hazy and dream-like in a way that made it hard to hang on to what’s happening. The premise is interesting, but I expected a mystery, not an existentialist meditation.

The initial worldbuilding is immersive and dizzying, a firehose of terms as if to impress indelibly the near-future-ness of the setting. Unfortunately, it was too much for me to track, too quickly, and I stopped a couple of chapters in. If the goal was to communicate the stress the characters were under, it certainly did that, but not in a way I could keep up with.

Stopping because I’m bored. Since it starts off with one of the two main characters having a vision about how she’ll fall in love with the other one, I immediately felt like any potential romance is pointless, since she wasn’t attracted before having the vision. There’s too little drama for it to be an exciting read, and too much trauma for it to be a soothing read, which hits an uncomfortable middle zone for me. 

I adjusted to the mixed dual-POV style, so this isn’t part of why O stopped, but it definitely threw me at first to have the focus of the third-person omniscient view switch between the two main characters repeatedly within each chapter.

There’s lot of great worldbuilding happening, with some cool details about items, clothing, and architecture, but that ultimately wasn’t enough to hold my interest.

Jack's style as a narrator (at least as far as I got) involves continually explaining the emotional landscape between the characters before there's any events which support it. It felt like meeting someone's friend group for the first time and having the introductions be a rapid-fire recounting of the last three fights everyone had while you're still trying to get their names to stick.

It opens by saying in the first few pages: 

The MC is dying of an illness which apparently no one survives past age 22, she's 21 when the book opens.  Her main personality traits are that she's dying, she has a best friend, and she seems simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by Sleeping Beauty as a story.

She oscillates between obsessively talking about how Sleeping Beauty is a garbage fairy tale and how she's dying just like sleeping beauty. It feels like someone turned their rant about how they hate this story into a retelling of it, but forgot to take the literal text of the rant out of the story. Huge sections of it are the MC talking about the flaws in the fairy tale. I wanted something that took the material and transformed it by rearranging it somehow, something that used the critiques to make the author's idea of a different/better story. Instead this book feels like a hate-write of the fairy tale, and I'm not invested enough to finish what would be a hate-read by the end, so I'm stopping.

Could immediately tell the style wasn’t for me.