Very fun and fast-paced read, the first book in this series serves as an introduction to what I anticipate will be a very dynamic and trope-bending adventure.

I listened to the audiobook, and I can say hands-down that this is the best audiobook narrator that I've ever listened to (and I listened to ~100 audiobooks last year). I usually avoid listening to audiobooks without a physical or e-book copy to reference because I get distracted if I don't know how to spell certain names, but it didn't happen with this audiobook. Everything was so smooth that I didn't find myself distracted at all.

The quite large cast of characters all stood out as individuals and were relatively well fleshed out, particularly in such a slim volume. I really enjoyed the balance of universality/individuality in our protagonist. One of the most annoying things I find with YA is that the protagonists are too much of a blank slate in order for younger readers to see themselves in the character. This doesn't happen here: Vivilyn is a relatively sheltered teenager and it's clear she's going to grow and change throughout the series, but she starts off with a solid base of preferences, opinions, unique hobbies, etc.

I'm really looking forward to the next book and discovering how magic plays/ed a role in the politics of this world.

A short read about the movement and proliferation of plant life. For such a slim volume, there was a lot of explanation on the human history side of the story and little on the science part of the subject. The majority of the scientific content seemed to be relegated to using the formal, Latin terminology for each species discussed.

It also seemed to both glorify and denounce colonization, depending on the chapter, rather than a more neutral take, or within a framework of the negative outcomes of humanity's impact on the planet.

Mancuso makes the same mistake a lot of popular science authors make and assigns human-like motivations and personalities to plant behavior and evolutionary patterns. It was fine in the beginning but began to grate towards the end.

I listened to the audiobook, so perhaps the illustrations in a hard copy would have been valuable.

Fantastic overview of all of the various broken components of American society that need fixing and how that will reduce the “need” for police to continue receiving bloated budgets.

Vitale covers the historical contexts just deeply enough to make the necessary points, and doesn’t weigh the text with detailed backstories. References provide further reading for those who are interested in deeper dives.

Very accessible language, and examples and historical references are a good mix of household name events/names as well as slightly more obscure ones.