DNF @ 14%. I have never been so glad to read other reviews and see that I'm definitely not alone in thinking this is so needlessly complex and confusing. 

DNF @ 15%, this just isn't what I want right now. It's interesting and has some well realized female leads, but it's so...melancholic and sad. And a bit boring.

DNFing because a lot of this world building and writing is just absolutely bonkers and terribly stupid. violet just happens to recite historical/geopolitical facts out loud to calm her anxiety and that's how we learn about the world? lmfao please

and i just cannot get past the whole premise of the war college and threshing ending in TONS AND TONS of young military cadets being MURDERED ALL THE TIME when there's an endless war and they're desperate for people to join! so desperate they CONSCRIPTED people!!! JUST TO HAVE THEM DIE BEFORE THEY EVEN STEP ONTO THE WAR COLLEGE GROUNDS? 60+ DIED IN THE FIRST MORNING??? make it make sense!!

also xaden is racially ambiguous and screamingly hot and muscled and of course violet is small so she barely comes up to his shoulders because big tall dark handsome man must be super big and tall and hot right??

i thought i'd give this a chance because the high star rating is absolutely fucking bonkers (4.78???), but nope. i really gotta trust my instincts more. at least the physical book is really pretty.

DNF@ 27% of the audiobook. This is so very tell not show kind of writing, especially in the Brittney POV where she and her co-host Jared break down and explain everything they're thinking and their theories about what they just learned. 

The pacing of Daisy's POV is incredibly slow compared to Brittney's, and it's creating massive tonal whiplash for me. This is especially noticeable by the dual narrators, who are both decent but are pretty awful at acting out voices or working out conversations. Often I can't tell when they've switched to someone else talking. 

I can see what this book is trying to do - because it's so obvious, neon glowing signs on every page obvious - but the journey there is just not for me. 

Made it to 5% and noped out because the main character is awful to everyone around her. If there’s a reason she’s this rude and acting stupid, I don’t care enough to keep reading to find out why. 

This book attempted to throw every single sci-fi horror trope at the wall and when I logged it after my last commute I could not believe that I was STILL ONLY HALF WAY THROUGH. So much happened. So much! And yet nothing at all! I had to throw in the towel at 55% into the audiobook, for a number of reasons. 

1. <b>The narration</b>. Because this was an audiobook review copy from NetGalley, I'll put narration here at the top as the thing that I disliked the most. The narrator was fine, when it was actual story narrative. However, the moment she does a character's voice, no matter which character, it fell apart for me. She can't act. She just can't. Every character voice sounded like she was TRYING to be emotional or witty or scared as the story called for, but it grated at me. All the choices she made for inflection, cadence, emotion, every single one felt wrong. 

2. <b>The characters</b>. This book didn't entire fail for me just because of the narration, however. By the 30% mark I was eye rolling at every single decision Petrova made. Actually, scratch that. I eye rolled HARD at the stupid fucking decision she makes in the SCENE THAT INTRODUCES US TO HER. She does the awful "go after a suspect who she just KNOOOWWWWWSSSS is guilty despite being commanded to stand down and ignoring direct orders just to fuck it all up" trope and it's a tired cliche in cop dramas and it's a tired cliche here. Every character in this feels like a trope to fill up a sci-fi story. We have a detective being ousted for a bad call. A pilot thinking this is his big chance. (These two characters had a brief romantic rendezvous years earlier and their reunion was so weird.) A doctor with a gruesome backstory that causes him to have PTSD and feels like he's coded as neurodivergent. A robot, because we always need a quirky robot friend, right? And of course there's ship AI all over the place being crazy, because we always need crazy AI in a sci-fi story, right?

3. <b>The story</b>. By the time I was half way through I really thought we were somewhere near the end of rising action. So much had happened to all the characters, big reveals were happening that felt like pieces of the story were finally locking into place - but its only halfway through? What the hell else can happen? In 50% of this book we had:

the characters fighting to stay alive after the ship is damaged, which is a massive part of the opening action; the characters figuring out each others backstories and learning to work together; figuring out why another ship is targeting attacks at them; going to that ship only to find a crazy AI and cannibal zombie-esque crew; and they're that way because some kind of disease is infecting AI and humans alike; one character has major, major injury done to them; they get back to their ship with a "cure" for the disease so they can fix their own ship AI; a big secret is revealed about one of the characters, changing the perspective of just about everything that has happened between them all so far.

AND THERE WAS STILL MORE STORY TO GO???? I looked at some reviews after I decided to DNF, and it appears that I just had a lot more story repetition and a terrible ending to look forward to, so I'll consider this a bullet dodged. 

4. <b>The writing</b>. Of all the downsides this book had for me in the half of it I read, the writing was not one of them. Wellington can write in a way that is very compelling, and is very easy to read. If I hadn't been listening to the audiobook, I would have sped through this a lot faster. The chapters are short, propelling you through the story at a breakneck pace. One thing I disliked was the repetition; characters shrug a lot. Like, a LOT. Even the robot does "an approximation of a shrug" half a dozen times in random weird bodies it can't even shrug in.

I hate DNFing something that is this long, but at 55% of this, I listened to the equivalent of 300+ pages of the book. I hated the characters and the plot beats were making no damn sense. I knew I just had to give up on finishing this despite it being a NetGalley review copy when I was even ranting to my <i>husband</i>, and realized I'd only be exposing him to more ranting if I kept going and I love him too much to keep doing that. 

DNF @ page 318. 

If I had known this would reflect our current American political and cultural landscape so well, I wouldn't have even bought this book in the first place. Mark me <i>firmly</i> in the "reads to escape reality" column.

DNF @ 39%, shocking myself more than anything. I really LOVED The Grace of Kings, but Wall of Storms feels like it took everything I enjoyed about the first book and just...made it longer and more boring than it needed to be. 

I'm not expecting a great action epic - I enjoyed the political maneuvering and the character relationships built up in the first book - but I also don't care to read pages of characters discussing various politics and philosophies. Like, look. My Bachelor's degree is in Philosophy. I love that shit. But not the way it's presented here.

Also, the kids all seem to be very full on caricatures. Maybe that changes later as they're developed, but right now they're so...they're boring! It's all so cliched and boring!

Man, I really thought I'd be continuing on with a series I could called a new favorite. Maybe I'll give this another try in a couple of years. 

DNF @ 12% on audio. I can see why people really enjoy this, but it's soooo not my thing. I wanted to give it a chance despite knowing I don't really vibe with historical fiction/novel of manners stories, even if they're fantasy. But! Not my thing, and that's okay. Happy I tried it, and happy to DNF now. 

DNF @ page 96. It simply isn't holding my attention at the moment. Might come back to this in the future.