My son is very into these books and wanted me to read with him. Very dark but super interesting premise. I also love all the details with
their names in the different regions.

Nothing beats the first one but I loved this trilogy.

This was fine, but overly fussy and I just couldn’t get myself to pick it up enough for the library check out expired.

Barnhill is a master. This was my first adult fiction of hers, and it was truly moving. The metaphor, the sorrow, the joy - the feminine experience was all there. 

So many one-liners in here that made me bark out loud in laughter and well-up with tears. This is just a lovely little fantasy tale. It reminded me a lot in tone of Discworld and Terry Pratchett novels. It was clever, sentimental, oh so charming.

This had so much going for it and overall, I very much enjoyed it. From the occult tarot perspective, working in New York museums, to the affairs and the drama: it was all very alluring. It’s a very slow burn and while technically a thriller it didn’t have a ton of very high suspense moments - just puzzle pieces clicking together. I did actually find one of the twists at the end surprising, but it truly fit the story and the narrative as we’d been presented it. So in that way, it was tightly crafted. It was, however, a little slow and dry.

More of the good stuff: tension, violence, fantastical plot, banter, and romance.

I listened to this as an audiobook, which I was pretty, unsure about given that it’s written as a dossier of collected documents, however, I think it really added to the experience. This was incredibly unique and engaging. As much as I’m sort of done with stories that have 18-year-olds as the focal point, this worked. It’s definitely character driven science fiction rather than tech and science driven - but generally, that is still my preference within the genre. I was also sort of surprised to notice halfway through that it’s technically classified as young adult. I suppose it’s no more traumatic and violent than say Divergent or The Hunger Games. I would just be thoughtful to be clear - this is not a middle grade book so much as a late middle school to high school book.

This didn’t go where I expected but I was extremely charmed by it and by every character. I also learned a lot about birds.

This was silly but the premise was so good. A paladin with a dead god. A perfumer? Adults with actual lives and boundaries, who are still hopelessly awkward? Swoon.