shane_the_reading_rat's Reviews (1.21k)

i genuinely loved all of this except for valérie’s ending

valérie was my favorite character throughout this book, she fascinated me and i thought it was really interesting how nina essentially represented what valérie never got to have— valérie didn’t get to marry hector, valérie had a family who only cared about her marrying someone rich, valérie never got to have freedom like nina did— it’s why she hated nina so much, at least in my eyes. but then valérie’s ending was essentially just her husband shipping her off so he wouldnt have to deal with her anymore + the specific line “but valérie hadnt known how to be happy”…????? i’d fully expected it to be more nuanced than this and to make it a commentary on how this fantasy society treats women, but then BOOM valérie is the sole villain because she “””couldn’t learn how to be happy”””. idk man it just threw me for a loop cause i didn’t expect that.

i’d moreso call this speculative than horror apart from maybe one scene

i liked elena. that’s honestly where what i liked about this book begins and ends.

i felt barely any draw towards peter as an mc, and even less towards june. im sorry but june was boring as hell :(
there were also two instances of implied or just straight up sexual assault that were incredibly unneeded and very uncomfortable to read. if i explained those this review would be miles long, that will be a rant for my reading journal.
also its wild that elena for some reason stayed at a school for like over a hundred years when one of the big reasons she had a bit of a breakdown while peter was gone was that all the geniuses she would communicate with treated her like a child??? it made genuinely no sense. she would hate being at a school for forever, having to learn the same things forever and act like theyre new.
i skimmed the finale and nearly fell asleep during it, which is honestly a feat. ive never started to fall asleep during the finale of a book before.

i think this book needed to be shorter and have the pacing sped up a bit in spots, but overall it handled its heavy topics extremely well. it feels odd to say i *enjoyed* such an intense book, but i think it handled an intricate plot pretty gracefully. i prefer Ace of Spades personally, but will read pretty much anything Faridah publishes in the future

this dnf is honestly my bad, i stopped reading this for like two weeks and by the time i returned to it, could not make myself care about it. might try it again another time but idk

i seriously will never shut up about this book.
i was enjoying it all the way through but

everything after Homily killed her sister

absolutely made it for me. by the time that final line happened where

homily and epilogue were like “we learned to get along while you were in hibernation because we wanted the same thing. we wanted you”

……. my guy i was already crying at the ending and when that line hit i started bawling omg. needless to say this story hit me very personally and very hard. i wouldn’t recommend it to everyone due to it being,, ngl a pretty weird story, but honestly i think the people who get it and love it will really get it, if that makes sense. <3

it just hit me that since homily’s sister is named epigraph (i think, i dont totally remember) and shesheshen’s offspring is named epilogue, and an epigraph/epilogue are the beginning/end chapters of some stories, that epigraph was homily’s beginning but not her end, and epilogue and her life with shesheshen is her end…… im crying again