dnf at like 15%. i wanted to like this. but there were just so many glaring issues for plot holes along side a confusing pile of organization names being used rapid fire. like they’re chinese spies in shanghai and their cover is to have european code names, speak english and french… like that makes you stand out more?? i couldn’t even try to keep up with the white flower, scarlet gang, communists, nationalists, the japanese, the russians. it was just too much. then it became at least 3 povs, maybe more but i bailed before finding out. i just can’t get through all that when i’m not into the book.

dnf'd at 34%. it just really wasn't for me. i like the greek classics well enough and i love a retelling from a different perspective. but the only part of this that was feminist is that circe is a woman, it's her pov, and she has autonomy. she has spent a third of the book vying for the love of men and hating women for doing the same. the writing itself was also so stilted and distant that it didn't feel like circe was an active participant in her own life, even on the aeaea island where she has autonomy. just really not for me.

i’ve never given up so fast but dnf at 8%. she was so deeply unlikable and boring. the vibes were so off and i couldn’t put a name to why… and then i found out the author is a cisman which unleashed incomprehensible rage i never could overcome.

dnf at 10%. i already wasn’t into the first book of the trilogy, to the point where i struggled to read it, so i really should have known better than to start the next one. that’s on me. i am a m.a. phipps lover but the project w.a.r. trilogy just didn’t work for me. pleaaaaase if you’re interested in this series, keep going! keep reading it! it just so happens that this was not for me, BUT phipps’s origin prophecy trilogy was! so if this series ain’t working for you, try that one instead!

dnf at 25%. the author clearly is more accustomed to nonfiction and the story telling didn't quite translate for this. i do know in the end we learn about the real people these characters are fictionalized retellings of, but that just makes dwelling on a teenager's sex organs even creepier. not to mention the whole desire to marry a child and the weird undercurrent where the suit maker thinks the protagonist is a child prostitute. just deeply uncomfortable narrative choices that had little to do with what the story set out to tell the reader.

dnf at 27% incredibly boring with bizarre thinly veiled racism and the stupidest fucking fantasy land names. i couldn’t have been paid to care. i’d have spent my time better scrubbing the shit out of a septic tank.

dnf at 20%. endless rehashing shit from the first 4
books and nothing in a compelling way. new information and plot was so disappointing that there was nothing worth reading. camille and john are both so deeply unlikable that it just really ruins the series for me.

dnf at 21%. the language being used between the korean and japanese characters was racially charged, which i imagine is realistic for yakuza and kkangpae/geondal. the problem was my increasing concern over the author being japanese or korean to at least provide cultural context and nuance to offensive racial insults their characters were using. after deep diving on reviews and the author, i've found this isn't particularly a romance novel so much as gay fiction and the author, while having a japanese last name, doesn't (anywhere publicly at least) identify as being japanese. so it's just a no from me.

dnf’d at 28%. why are we talking about a minor jacking off? i got so apprehensive about going forward that i searched the book for further instances of underage sexual content and there’s more. i don’t want anything to do with that nor is it remotely readable. i wasn’t connecting well with the book in the first place but that’s the final straw.

dnf at 46%. there isn’t a single thing i can say that the 1 and 2 star reviews haven’t already said. the narrator is so deeply unlikable that i have to commend summers for capturing the pretentiousness of a boomer/gen x cusp egomaniac. what summers did fail to do though was make a character worth reading about. dorothy calls herself a “howling void” and doubles down on her intellectual and sexual superiority, which she won’t stop force feeding her reader without a single allegorical symbol. i am more familiar with dorothy’s vagina than i am with the parts under the hood of the car i’ve owned for the last 12 years. her entire story is direct, but passed through a word salad cheese grater; because of course she needs you to know she’s an excellent author—disregard that a good author makes their books readable rather than a mental exercise in misused, antiquated language. it turns out her “howling void” is nothing more than a complete lack of personality and a somehow boring recounting of her sex life and cannibalism.