I really liked the idea of a book where a 14 year old boy wakes up as a 14 year old girl, and has to deal with bullies, and creepy men, and periods. But there was so much cult-y drama with the Changers Council and all of the dogma bogged down the book. A lot of great ideas were presented and then went unexplored.

JESUS CHRIST WAS THAT DEPRESSING

This didn't have enough magic for me, and everyone was so damn mean to Vasilissa throughout the entire book and it just depressed me.

My final take on this trilogy is that it is very entertaining, both at age 14 and at age 24, but Thomson spends too much time inside Chloe's head. I want more of a sense of the world. She did a great job of convincing me that Chloe was the right leader, but I wanted to see more of how the Mai lived and their interactions with each other, something I thought the tv show a better job of. I did like the ending. It was very solid and didn't leave me wishing for an extra chapter.

Spoiler

I really hated Amy throughout the entire trilogy, and I loved Alyec, so I'm pretty heartbroken they ended up together. And while I don't like Brian I did see why Chloe did so I thought that was cute.

I love all the intrigue and the mystery and the character relations, but I felt like this book was a little too slow. I wanted to see more of the world; the small scenes like the hunt were great, but too far between, and I would have preferred more time seeing the characters than seeing Chloe's thoughts about them.

I liked these books as a teenager, and now reading them ten years later I am struck by what a bitch Chloe is -- and how much I like her anyway. She is a strong character who isn't nice or polite, and instead is impulsive, ferocious, and brave and it makes her fascinating. This book does get off to a slow start, and I wish it had spent less time on her normal life and more time with the other cat people.

This started off poorly when I started reading the annotations and realized he was just going to mansplain the entire book.

It got worse when both princesses were the same, and every other character from the God King to Lightsong was dull-witted and useless.

It got sexist when Siri (yeah, her fucking name is Siri) didn't even get upset when people referred to her as Vessel, because her entire purpose for existing was to make a baby, and the only female character with any agency was disparaged for the entire book for wearing revealing clothing right up until the second she got killed because a shitty man wouldn't give up a password and he had to be Taught A Lesson.

It got racist when you found out the Real Villains All Along were the beleaguered countrypeople down south were orchestrating a war between the two countries--and not one but two characters figure out they are evil BECAUSE THEIR FUCKING SKIN TONE IS SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT THAN EVERYONE ELSE.

The magic system also made no sense. I have to use Breath, but also wear colors so I can drain them? And you have to give all of your breath away at once, except for you could just Awaken something small that only takes a few breaths, give the rest away, and then get those few breaths back from the item in question. Stupid.

I don't think I've ever read a book where the main characters were bored, but these guys were constantly complaining about how bored they were. HEY, ME TOO, SANDO.

It was 656 painful boring pages of drivel. I didn't care about the war, I didn't care about the betrayals. I do care about the hours of my life wasted in this garbage universe.