3.5 stars. This was ... fine. It had a lot of the tropes that I enjoy - bad boy kidnaps good girl for the right reasons, a portion of the land and people has been excommunicated from the rest of the land, and such. All over though, this was kind of formulaic. Which -to a degree - is fine. It’s a formula that works. I just wish that this had been just a little more new, a little more brave. I’ll probably read the sequel just to see where I goes from here, but I’m not itching at the seems to get my hands on the next book.

Great. Fantastic. This was a perfect second book. It really ramps up the tenseness, the action, the drama. Now, we’re really on a quest to save the universe from imminent destruction. I’m so excited to see where the third book goes and how it wraps it all up.

I wish I had connected more with this book. As it was, it made itself difficult to get through. By about halfway through, I was tired of Alys having basically the same argument with different people. Valentine suddenly changes personas with very little precursor or explanation. (Or perhaps too subtle of a precursor.) While I appreciate this book for a look into a culture I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, the story itself isn’t as well told as I might have wanted.

I really loved this. I really really loved this. I loved this so much, I’m 100% willing to forgive it the questions that it didn’t quite answer. (If it did answer, I missed that. It’s possible.)

I loved the characters, and the world and just everyone about it. Arthur and Linus, all the children, even the darn cat. I love that being queer here is so accepted, it’s almost taken for granted.

I read this book alongside The Fifth Season and boy howdy, do they make quite a double feature of being super relevant right now. I swear I didn’t plan that.

Humans can’t smell.

There’s some really good books about kids out there. But this is the kind of story where kids, in all their preteen arrogance, make stupid, borderline dangerous decisions when what they should be doing is getting an adult involved. So it was frustrating to read.

That being said, it was an interesting book for the portrayal of gender fluidity and also - and I didn’t expect this - of its portrayal of synesthesia. I’ve read a few books where a character is genderfluid in some regard and a few books where a character has synesthesia, but neither have ever been portrayed like they were here, and I think this is the portrayal of each that will stick with me.

This took a while for me to get in to. And it was right about the 40% mark that the book really clicked for me - the humor, the plot line, the characters. AND NOW I am ON BOARD for Friedland’s other books, especially if they have this same energy - a crazy, chaotic, all-over-the-map family who, at the heart of it, love each other. (Mostly.)

I’m hoping The Floating Feldmans will be pretty much this book but on a cruise ship.