This will be a review in two parts, one being a review for this book on its own, the second part being for the trilogy as a whole, plus the short story that takes place between books 2 and 3.

By the way, read that short story before you start book 3, it's got some pretty important stuff crammed into its 50 pages.

As with the rest of this series, everything with this book was done well. The characters were compelling, the continued worldbuilding was on point, and the plot built up to a breakneck pace by the end. The only "complaint" I have is the way the 2 timelines were handled, although I can't say I have a suggestion for how it could have been done better. While necessary for the story, the way the story alternated between the 2 was rather jarring. Just as one storyline is building up to something important the book would cut to the other timeline and then you have to remember where that timeline left off. I read a lot of books with multiple POVs and even some with multiple timelines, so this wasn't a huge obstacle for me but it did occasionally pull me out of the story. I knew it was done purposefully though, so I didn't let it irritate me too much. The pay off was satisfying so all is forgiven.

From here on out---spoilers!

Sister Apple! Sister Pan! Just tear out my heart already Mark Lawrence. I was so happy-devastated when we had some impactful deaths at the end. While none of the main crew died, we did lose Sister Apple, the glorious Sister Pan, and the oft-despised Sister Wheel, not to mention most of the other nuns and novices from Sweet Mercy. I feel like Ara should have died but that's just some personal preference speaking.
Binge-reading all 3 books did allow me to better see the common structure of these books than if I would have read them more spread out. Because of this, I knew we were going to have an Abbess Glass manipulation going on (which is done in a very heist-story way, my favorite), a big battle, and at least one death of someone close to Nona. I honestly thought Ara might die, but somehow she squeaked through. The only downside was knowing that the Glass twist was coming. I didn't know what it was, but I knew something was going to happen and (sadly) that was enough to ease some of the tension.

As a trilogy, these books worked great. The first book set everything up in a compelling way (so much so that I attempted to read something else after it and couldn't, I had to read Grey Sister), I didn't feel any sort of slump in the middle, the finale was satisfying and impactful, and there were enough threads between all 3 to get that little spark of satisfaction when something casually mentioned a book or 2 before turned out to have a purpose after all. Overall, I was very impressed with this trilogy and can't recommend it enough.

You can check out my full ranty review over at my channel: https://youtu.be/6vefjM4e3QA
This book was so bad, I honestly can't think of a single thing I liked about it. Normally I would have DNF'd and moved on, but I was reading it for a readathon and didn't feel like finding a different book to use for the challenge. Looking back, maybe I should have?

We'll start with Sirantha since she's the main character. She spends the whole book with no agency, blames herself constantly for other people actions and decisions, blames herself for her own actions she had literally no way of knowing would cause problems because no one around her bothers to tell her or warn her about anything. She also isn't much of a thinker, as evidenced by

the fact that she never stops to think why the corporation she works for would want to crash a ship and kill everyone on board. Apparently she assumed they did it for fun.

March, the pretty obvious eventual love interest, is the gruff, kind of a jerk captain who is actually so kind underneath and is super heroic once you get past his prickly exterior. Oh, and in case you were wondering, he has a saturnine smile which the author feels the need to tell us multiple times. I had to look up the definition because she kept using it so often that I thought maybe it was important somehow. It just means bitter or gloomy. Cool.

He's also psychic and can read Sirantha's thoughts all the time except when it's convenient for him not to. It's also a huge secret, but he's constantly responding to Sirantha's thoughts in front of other people and no one notices. Are all of these characters oblivious?

Now the main part of this book — the romance. You probably thought I was going to say the supposed plot summarized on the back of the book, but you would be wrong. It's really all about Sirantha and March and their bickery, bantery flirt fest, a hate-to-love relationship culminating in the best sex and also best almost-sex ever. Safe to say, I spent a lot of the time reading this book shaking my head and rolling my eyes.
The plot is pretty thin. The crew of the Folly manages to sneak on board a Corporation ship, March sneaks to Sirantha's cell, breaks her out, and gets them back to the ship almost entirely without being noticed. An alarm goes off while they're heading back to the ship but the "grey men" who are super determined security guards or something, take a really long time to get to the hanger, allowing for a prolonged conversation once aboard. Then they head off to some random planet and we eventually learn the whole point of the break out — they want Sirantha to teach other jumpers at some as-yet unestablished Academy, thus breaking the Corporations stranglehold on grimspace travel, and by extension trade and pretty much any other facet of life requiring interstellar travel.
But none of that is actually important. It's all about Sirantha and March eventually, finally, hooking up and being in L-O-V-E.

Honestly, I made it through the first half of this book thinking it was going to be a 3 star meh read. Thankfully things picked up after that and bumped the overall rating up to a 4. Enjoyable though not mind-blowing.

This was a tough one. I enjoyed the the story, it was all the scientific and philosophical chunks that got in the way and subsequently slowed this book waaaayyy down. It took me nearly a week to break the 100 page mark and then close to another week to finish the rest of the book.
The story itself was enjoyable though. The main character Haimey Dz was interesting, with a screwed up history giving her believable, manifest problems in the present. The repetition of observations and asides got irritating after awhile, but on the whole I didn’t actively dislike her.
My favorite character though? Bushyasta the sleeping cat.

Not good guys. Not good at all.

The only compliment I can give this book is that concept behind the magic is cool. Clairvoyance is real and people can interact with the spirit realm through tarot or seances or things like that. But that’s the only good thing I can say.

I had so many problems with this book and it was a bit of a slog to get through. It took quite a while to get going—for as little as happened, the 450 pages is simply unjustifiable. The content: info dumps, so many plot conveniences, more info dumps, bland side characters I had no hope of keeping straight, a billion different types of voyancy (spirit magic) that are barely explained in most cases, aliens/magical beings/whatever that are basically exactly like humans but “are totally different from us,” a pretty stupid main character, and did I mention the info dumps?

So many eye rolls. And sighs of annoyance.