I got some mixed feelings, some parts I liked, some I didn’t get along with great.

The parts I liked

The main characters Peter and Fi are cool and mysterious, I want to follow them and find out more. Peter’s a mage whose unique power is to make bubbles. It’s an odd magical power but it’s super interesting to see how he applies it to all sorts of situations, such as combat or transportation.

Fi’s a chimera, so from the beginning of the book I wanted to know what was up with that. She’s also a spunky young teenager sick of the world not taking her seriously. Who can’t relate to that, amirite? Seeing her in her natural element whizzing along being all kinds of competent towards the end of the book was a joy.

The worldbuilding is very intriguing, every new bit of information holds a hint of a new mystery. I was picturing it all in default medievalland till a train sped through the city. The natural world is great, there’s a huge creepy forest that’s very vivid and detailed. There are a lot of magical creatures that I’d love to find out more about.

The last quarter of the book had a bit of a rollercoaster thing going for it, with a flashback I didn’t figure out was a flashback for an embarrassing length of time, and I got a lot more invested in the story.

The parts I didn’t like so much

My main complaint was that some things seemed inconsistent. For instance, it’s all happy cheerful adventure, then bam! A messed up gory as hell scene. The escape from which felt kinda ‘for plot reasons’ rather than through any sort of logical chain of events,. I would have wtf and put it aside at that point, but I feel like I have a duty towards books I get for free so I stuck it out. The last third or so was much clicked better with me than the previous and I was able to really get into it. Might also be that I read the last part on a plane ride with no distractions and book was fine all along but my focus was off.

I’m not a native speaker, so I feel weird judging this, but I had some problems with the language. Referring to the 13 year old as little girl over and over bugged me. Girl’s fine, but if 13 is little girl, then what’s a 7 year old? Another thing was that sometimes the writing felt a bit unnatural, kinda trying too hard, dialogue that didn’t really sound like real people, or paragraphs containing a few too many descriptors.

I listened to the audio for about 50% of the book before switching to text. The  character voices were cool, but the narration voice was too slow for my liking, with a some pauses that I found annoying.

I rate it as Okay, I might read the sequel when it comes out cause I’m curious about the characters and worldbuilding, but it’s not at the top of mount TBR.