This is the first in a trilogy, so I feel bad in faulting it for being incomplete, but this just felt very incomplete in a way that frustrated me (and, as you can see by how long it took me to finish, it also put a real dent in my reading for January).
This novel has a cool set up and a mishmosh of genres, and of course I am all here for any sort of scifi novel that entirely sidesteps centering Western norms for a framework based elsewhere (here, Nigeria and Lagos). But it was so very hard to get into this novel, and that really put a dent in my enjoyment of it. A very eye-roll-y part was also Kaaro’s so-very-typical/does it have to be par for the course??? casual misogyny which doesn’t really add anything to the story but definitely does detract in a huge way for me from my enjoyment.
Pro tip, authors of the world: if your heterosexual male character can not comment on the f**kability of a female character and the main point of your novel can continue…perhaps…skip it every so often? That way romance novelists can continue to have characters make eye sex at one another 24/7 and the rest of us can read books where the focus is sometimes, well, not that.
Another part that made it hard to get into this novel is the endless time skips which, woah. I cannot imagine reading this as an audiobook which it seems like many people did? If I were more into this book I would have needed to take notes, but as it were I just tried to let it wash over me and hope that I managed to pick up the main threads of the plot.
And…I think I did? Maybe not enough, because I do not feel super compelled to keep reading to the next book in the series. More frustratingly, neither does the person who recommended this novel to me. And that, I feel, is a bit of a faux pas. If you’re going to recommend a book, shouldn’t it be one you’re enthusiastic about such that you’re eagerly waiting the second??