Interesting setting/worldbuilding but ... I dunno. This is a depressing story about a bunch of depressing people. It is a fairly cynical view of humanity. A lot of things randomly happen for narrative convenience and are hand-waved away (people die out of nowhere; other people survive situations they really oughtn't; the palace is impossible to take with an entire rebel force early in the book, but easy to take with a handful of soldiers toward the end; a certain character is remarkably, preternaturally good at fighting and murdering, until for unexplained reasons she just loses the ability to hold weapons or even make fists)...

Some of the tiny details of the setting are still bothering me (how did the Citizens, a small band of nomadic travelers, manage to overharvest a particular flower to the point of extinction? what the heck is an "ankle skirt" and how would that even work? why are Mouth's sections in the third person and Sophies' in the first?)... the characters don't really learn or change throughout the story, and insist on making inexplicably bad and self-destructive choices, but don't seem to have enough self-awareness of their emotional states to understand why (or for the reader to understand why).

For a book that seems to be trying, at least in part, to make a point about trauma not defining people, it has a lot of characters whose only defining characteristic is their trauma. In fact everyone is pretty two-dimensional and hard to believe in as people. I kept getting the two protagonists confused because they don't feel like very different characters. And then you'd get other characters saying things that were not backed up by anything in the narrative, like "you were always just so yourself... that sweet and passionate girl" (to Sophie) or "you were always the strongest of us" (to Alyssa) when there was really nothing in the entire rest of the book to make that seem true.

And then the cop-out ending where it's just?? Hanging? Nothing gets resolved and you just get to guess what happens? I'm just so angry lol