dnf’d this for a few days, but picked it up again and the ending was honestly pretty heartwarming :) rest of the book was worth getting to that ending

forgot to review this, came back a couple days later, and now i’ve basically forgotten the majority of the book :/ didn’t really stick with me. i liked roxy and maxima though!! they were both the highlights of this book for me

if you like audio drama podcasts (especially Welcome To Night Vale, which is listed as an inspiration in the acknowledgments!) then i think you will probably enjoy this book :)

from the synposis, i thought i’d enjoy this a lot more than i did :/ it’s well written!! the pace was just very slow for my own tastes (i also could not get a good grip on the passage of time in this book. no idea what the time frame was). i just generally found it a bit confusing. i think this will work for many readers :D just not for me.

enjoyed this :D favorite character was Louise,

but i always like shapeshifter characters best, so that’s not surprising

wasn’t a big fan of this :/ pretty cover though!!
i liked the first section of this book, and i like Sophia as a character. where i kinda start to have problems is with Melody/Solmi (i’ll call her Melody as that is what the synopsis calls her, but she is also named Solmi).
it just felt like her actions were extremely immature and like she didn’t understand consequences of what she did. she did have a bit of character growth over the course of the book, but not really enough for me to actually like her.

i was glad to see both Yura and Sophie call Melody out on this at different times, but that still didn’t really go anywhere. i also really didn’t feel the chemistry between Melody and Wongjae. it felt like a partially-baked enemies-to-lovers thing? and i really dont like enemies-to-lovers as a trope, so it might just be me not getting the chemistry.

sadly, my other problem with this book was Kimbeom. it just felt like he had no personality other than the tension surrounding him and his dad, seemed really one-dimensional. also the Chuseok dinner party scene made me genuinely upset, where Melody was about to start yelling at Kimbeom’s dad, likely outing poor Kimbeom to everyone there. thankfully he stopped her, but a few pages later Melody’s mom agrees that maybe Melody SHOULD have called out Kimbeom’s dad in front of everyone. i cannot just let that slide, it felt so weird that no one except Kimbeom himself was like “don’t do that.” that is outing someone and i just really dont feel great that no other characters (who weren’t Kimbeom) acknowledged  that that was a horrible idea. also after Kimbeom says that his mom told his dad she would divorce him unless he apologized to Kimbeom and took back the plan to send him to boarding school in Boston, there’s just no follow-up after that? it felt like the poor guy’s side plot got tossed to the wayside to accommodate for the romantic development between Wongjae and Melody.

so over all, cover is very pretty, but i wasn’t a big fan of the story. i will read whatever Claire Ahn writes next though!!