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I have thoughts... Not entirely done processing the story yet.
There's a lot of good stuff in here, but I feel like the time spent describing how magic works took the place of the fun relationships and banter that I loved from books 1 and 2.
El is dealing with a lot and we see her struggling to process it. She becomes very passive in several parts of the book, which felt like a very big turn from her usual self. Is that an effect of her trauma, or bad writing/plot development?
El's relationship with Liesel certainly changed a lot. It felt like an odd choice for El's main sidekick throughout the book. Still thinking over this character...
I really wanted to see more of El and Orion together. That was definitely missing from the story.
Mostly I feel like Novik tried to touch on some great themes, like processing trauma, but lost a lot of fun parts of books 1 and 2 that makes it worth slogging through the emotional trauma parts.
I need to read this again, when I'm not recovering from covid and fighting off migraines. I'm really curious what a reread will reveal.

Eve Duncan is not my favorite main character. She is so oblivious to the relationships around her, which I think is intentional, but it's not my favorite strategy for inserting twists into a story. She's set up as this character with a tragic background, who has focused on her work intentionally to forget her grief. Joe tiptoes around her and kind of puppeteers her recovery behind the scenes (and he is also in love with Eve, which I called in Chapter 15 but was disappointed to find that Eve couldn't just have one male friend). Logan sees her soft side behind her walls and falls in love with her because of it (called it in Chapter 1 that John Logan was going to fall in love with Eve).

I think I had a hard time feeling anything for Eve (or really, any of the characters) because even though she's the main character, we as the readers are removed from her thoughts and decision-making. The story is written in 3rd person, and it doesn't really feel like we are any closer to Eve's thought processes than we are with the other characters in the story whose POVs we are given (Logan, Joe, Lisa, Fiske, etc). Everything is external: all decisions and plans are made in dialogue. Even Eve's personality is expressed entirely through dialogue. She basically just argues with everybody the whole time :shrug:

Fiske is a pretty scary character, but I didn't feel it viscerally. I didn't feel personally threatened by him. I've read much scarier, unnerving villains in the past, ones that made me personally afraid for my safety just by reading the book. I feel like Fiske should have added a layer of dread to the reading of this book, and he just didn't.

The twist at the end (where Lisa reveals that Ben knew he was going to die and planned the whole thing) didn't feel as impactful as it should have. I had a hard time believing Lisa-as-a-cold-murderer was actually Lisa-the-mournful-widow who is just executing a plan that her husband engineered.

The initial story where Eve believes Logan is looking for Kennedy's skull was SO cliché, I'm glad it changed into something else. But I feel like the author was going for this epic story, and it sort of just got lost in the logistics. It's just a lot of driving around between places and waiting for things to happen.

Also was really disappointed to find that there were no on-stage romance scenes with Eve and Logan at any point in the book. We just get some vague impressions of things happening behind-the-scenes in the epilogue.

Speaking of the epilogue: the interludes where Eve dreams about Bonnie were sort of odd. I'm not sure how I feel about them. Bonnie insists that she's not a dream, and Eve insists that Bonnie is just her imagination. They sort of serve as foreshadowing within the story, where Bonnie warns Eve about something, in case the reader didn't already pick up on the previous clues dropped in the story.

I truly enjoyed the sections of the story where Eve is actually doing her work. I most enjoyed the sections where she explains how certain processes work. She explains the process of reconstructing the skull, doing the superimposition of the reconstructed skull and pictures of the victim, and the use of chemiluminescence for DNA printing. Those details were fascinating and I'm really glad the author chose to include them.

I binged this book in a single day. I've been on a kick with sci-fi romances (just finished basically everything by Jessie Mihalik) and this definitely fell into that category. This is the first book I've read by Amanda Bouchet, and I think she's a fairly strong writer, although not the strongest. There were some phrases of hers that I really loved; I really enjoyed her writing style.

My name was a bomb. It blew people away.

The main character, Tess Bailey, started off very strong. She's a badass ship captain, she and her crew steal from the rich and give to the poor. They've just stolen something very important from the government and are at the end of their endurance, having been chased from one end of the universe to the other. They're out of fuel and getting desperate. Tess would rather die than hand over what she's stolen. She gives her crew a choice; they choose to stay with her. She drops a major bomb (metaphorically) on them, and then takes them to their deaths...

I was really drawn in by the beginning of this story. Obviously Tess has a bit of history that she's not fully sharing. As you continue reading, you begin to piece together her life. She's gone through a hell of a lot, and she's only 26. I love piecing together a history instead of getting a big info-dump all at once. I thought the author did a great job with that.

I also really enjoyed getting Shade's point of view, surprisingly. I don't usually like books that swap POVs, but I thought this book did a good job of giving you just enough of his POV without making you feel like you were missing out on the main character's POV. I think it also added some great tension to the interactions between Tess and Shade, because you know what Shade is struggling with, and Tess is pretty oblivious.

Speaking of Tess' obliviousness...there were times when I found it pretty hard to believe that she was so easy-going, laidback, carefree with Shade (and Susan). She's literally had the worst things imaginable happen to her in the last 7 years. She's on the run from the tyrant government, has been on the run from them for years...but she's not as gritty as I would expect her to be, I guess. Shade remarks on that too, so maybe that's just what makes her so special, but it was really hard to believe and I found it hard to suspend my disbelief occasionally.

Also, what is it with sci-fi romances; every single one I've read, the characters are having these intense discussions/interactions during a time where they need to get somewhere as quickly as possible or risk getting captured/killed? Maybe now's not the time!

Overall, I enjoyed the story. It does feel a little naive at times, for a character who has been through so much. But there were also scenes that made me laugh out loud. Definitely worth a read!

Got 14% of the way through this book and just could not do it anymore. There are no likeable characters. The main female character, Amber Bierce, is a woman determined to get men to listen to her as they try to survive on an alien planet. I endure enough mansplaining and fragile-white-man-hostility in real life without needing to read it directed at Amber. The other POV is of Meoraq, who rapes the females around him. Also not great to read about. The plot is extremely slow-paced, which I wouldn't ordinarily mind, if I remotely liked any of the characters. No thanks.