Well I guess that answers that question. TikTok does indeed have bad taste. The premise of this book was so promising, and there really were hints of greatness in here. But damn if I wanted to waste hours upon hours of one-dimensional characters talk to each other, I would have started watching Passions again. For a book about the most magical people in the world in the most secretive society filled with magic and lost information, we sure don't see literally any of it. I think I picked up about 3/4ths of the way through that this was actually just serialized fanfiction of X-Men, but if I would have realized sooner, I wouldn't have bothered with it.

The markings of serialized fan fiction structure were all over this. Mindless subplots that don't seem to go anywhere, loose continuity between chapters, and a distinct lack of character development because we don't really spend a lot of time with any one character. This tried extremely hard to be philosophical, scientific, and mysterious but fell short at each, ending up being largely a mess of unrealized relationships and a slapped together mystery. Because 90% of the book was just interactions between the 7-8 characters of the book, there was a comical amount of "tell not show." Characters are TELLING us about how other characters are manipulating other characters. They're TELLING us how characters think about themselves and each other. They're TELLING us about the secretive actions of the shadow society. But NONE of it is shown, which made it all utterly unbelievable. This was a slog all the way until literally the last 20 pages where there was actually action that happened, which led to a ridiculous amount of info dumping in the final 10 pages. This really could have been great with some editing, and it may end up being great in the next one. But I'd be hard pressed to continue with it.