This is temporary, I’ll restart it sometime in 2025

Won this through a Storygraph giveaway ages ago, finally got around to reading it. I got so mad about the half-assed world-building (WHY PICK A SCI-FI SETTING IF YOU REFUSE TO ENGAGE WITH THE “SCI” PART??) around the 54% mark that I really wanted to DNF, but couldn’t for Reading Challenge Reasons. The author has a good writing style and there was a lot of care in creating the characters, but I’m not going to bother with the sequel because I’ll just start thinking about the literal-planet-sized-holes in the worldbuilding again. Am I too focused on a few throwaway lines that my review became unfair? Yes and I recognize that, but it was the only thing I could think about when reading this.

Pros:

Writing flows well, using italics to indicate spoken word was a nice choice (it’s not consistent but the attempt is appreciated). Pacing’s good and the tension is well-maintained throughout the book. The plot is interesting and (aside from the “world”building) it’s a decent story.

I’m a fan of how it’s not “a utopia except the Old Tongue-“. There are still actual societal and cultural problems unrelated to basic survival or war, which is a nice change for something set on ‘not Earth’.

Physical descriptions of characters are great! The author put a lot of care into them throughout the book, to the point that “lovingly crafted” is a very apt description.

Cons: 

The explanation containing worldbuilding, or at least a version of it, should’ve happened sooner, such as “when Emrie was teaching it to her students”. Waiting until 33% into the book was too long.

All the narrators ‘sound’ the same, and did we *really* need a fourth one halfway through the book? And then a fifth at the 70% mark??? 

Verb tenses/conjugations need some more work.

The only queer rep is the main antagonist, and not even in an interesting way. Why include it at all if that’s the case?

Any sort of worldbuilding greater than coming up with a country is absolutely nonexistent, which is INSANE given the setting of “1000 years after humans colonized a planet not in our solar system”. There are some WILD implications, most of which I had to retype from angry texts I sent while reading:

Also, what about blind people in this world, if the primary communication form is reliant on sight and sound-based communication is entirely nonexistent?

Cons: Ugh, Mantasy™️. Cool it with the sexual assault, breasts, and objectification of children and women. AQoP would be so much better if it wasn’t a 30+ year old and a 15 year old.

Pros: Horse Girl Geralt is real, and it’s cool to see what was inspired by fairy tales and what the show adapted

It ended too neatly and the stakes rose pretty dang high. I dunno if it could get resolved in the next one, but who know?