Having a scheming protagonist is not fun if:
1) The reader doesn't get to be let in on the plans
2) The schemes aren't that cool anyway

I kept thinking, "How long can this series keep up being awesome, when its merits are based on intriguing mysteries and romantic tension?" The answer is, until the book before this one. My love for the series unfortunately ends here.

Cool idea: In the sci-fi future, a phone company has become the most powerful organization due to their monopoly on communication.
Lame idea: It is referred to as "The Phone Company" the entire time.

I feel like this novella kept trying to knock over dominos that it hadn't actually set up yet

Interesting concept, well pulled off

My least favorite in the trilogy. Now that I think about it, tho Sanderson BOOKS tend to have great endings, I can't think of a Sanderson ENDING TO A SERIES that I didn't think was weaker than what came before.

This book is not for people who are not already obsessed with the Ember in the Ashes Quartet. I hadn't read those books, and I assumed that because this was marketed as a book 1 this would be a good place to start with the world. It wasn't. It is entirely unwelcoming to someone who isn't already familiar with the worldbuilding and characters. It repeatedly left out important worldbuilding info and left me very confused.

I think that most of the people who are going to love this novel are the ones that are already in love with the characters from the previous books (as the glowing reviews here on Goodreads demonstrate). There's many characters from the first series that come back, and you get to see where they are now. For me, I felt like it was boring and annoying to have the flow of the story repeatedly interrupted by these obnoxious cut ins.

The new characters are likewise boring. A big part of this was the balance and pacing between them. We have three narrators, and are constantly switching between them. Just when I am slightly interested in one plotline, we are ripped away from it. By the time we made it back around, I had stopped caring about the character again.

Thanks to Netgalley and G.P. Putnam's Sons for a copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

Neat ideas, neat twists.