Congrats to Chuck TIngle for his Stoker nomination!! This was my first Tingler and I had the time of my life! I thought it was fun and sweet and I loved the non-sexual erotica. I definitely will be reading more Tinglers in the future! :)

i just read like 7 sci-fi books in a row i think i need a break. 

I think it's really interesting to see specific motifs recur in Vandermeer's work

like oppressive, environmentally devastating, and unethical corporations, but also smaller things like tidal pools.

Definitely not as good as the Southern Reach Trilogy, but still really fascinating and engaging scifi. 

I just feel like I didn't really care about the characters.

It's a backstory for a cloak. I don't really see much reason WHY I should care for it (other than of course the fact that it was alive as a cloak and a sad backstory).

Maybe it was because I turned this on while I worked on something (never really been an issue before), but I just didn't really care about it. And I feel bad because I do like Vandermeer and his writing style. I think maybe I just listened to his better work first and everything else just isn't living up to my expectations. 

Full disclosure I fully checked out with about 2 hours left because I really stopped caring about the characters. The last book was really fun and had an ensemble cast that joked with each other and messed around and formed meaningful connections. With such a small cast and half of the book dedicated to backstory, it made it a lot harder for me to connect with the characters because I was looking for what I enjoyed about the first book. 

I'm annoyed that it we never get any real closure about the crew of the Wayfarer.

We know Jenks is sad that he lost Lovey, but we don't know what the fuck happened to Ohan. How is he adjusting after being forcefully ripped away from his religion? Does he care? Has he realized this is better for him? Did he have to go through cult reprogramming or something? Fuck, we don't even know what happened to what seemed like the start of an intergalactic civil war. What's going on with that?

The biggest factors in deciding to read this book were 1) I wanted to know what happened to certain a character from the last book because they had gone through a pretty major change; 2) I wanted to see the story continue from where it left off. It was left on a cliffhanger with a major political event that sounded like it would have a massive impact on the entire galaxy. And 3) I was troubled by the language Chambers used to describe the Toremi in the last book because it was concerning similar to real life anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia. I was hoping the events of the next few books would fix the issues I had with it, but this book didn't reference it in the slightest and based on the synopses of the next two, they won't either. 

I'm really disappointed because I did like the first book enough to recommend it to a few friends and reread while my boyfriend read it for the first time and this book was nothing like what I did enjoy about the first one.