blog, librarian, star and city

i read it in one go in the past five hours and it was absolutely what i’d wanted it to be which is a queer story in a fantasy setting with a compelling enough story/stakes without being like so dense it gives me ten headaches. i don’t want to have to learn three empires worth of politics, i just want something interesting but also kinda trope-y and feel-good ! and it’s what i got.

i think the one point i was a bit dubious about was the constant mentions of leo getting drunk as a skunk. i don’t… think they actually helped the story much? like a couple times it’s certainly convenient for him to be clumsy or whatever but otherwise i feel like his emotional state and fatigue/desperation were more than enough to have him in an altered state without having to add alcohol on top. like brother ? are you an alcoholic ? but it’s never really addressed either that he may be overreliant on drink as a coping mechanism at the very least. maybe it’ll come up in the later books

i found all the characters well-made though, especially as the story progressed. i liked that most things were like… fairly obvious if you had the pieces and you could kind of build the links between information at the same time as leo, whose POV you have. but there’s some turns the story takes that you do NOT see coming either and they’re not twists persay but they’re also definitely not… predictable? and i like that you can think back on details given early on which then take on a whole new meaning once you have the info abt the characters that you do have by the end.

also i think one thing that i gotta say is that the book was fundamentally just. enjoyable! i laughed, gasped, kicked my feet, made little comments to myself as i read, etc. i was having a good time! and that’s what i liked the most. regardless of objective quality or whatever (and what do i know about writing. i’m a biomedical science graduate) i was just having tons of fun reading this and it sucked me in !!! i will probably be drawing leo and grimm at some point…. nods.