Tldr: 🤯🤯🤯😱😱😱

How do I even start this review? Jesus, what a wild ride! This is definitely the best book in the series so far, absolutely gripping!

I've a few things that I wasn't a fan of, but this book is 96 / 100 for me.

For starters, the middle of this book was....meh?
We were on a roller coaster from start til the middle and then it just...stopped? The gang is stuck in a library for years, in search of something they don't even know is there or what it even is.
And then the story hops us right back on the roller-coaster. It was quite jarring, like watching a one-shot action scene from the Daredevil TV show and Matt suddenly stops fighting to go sit on a chair reading a newspaper, flicking through the pages, then gently putting the paper back down and going back into the fight. Like I said, jarring!

My other issue was a lot of the explanations in this book were inadequate, at least for me. From the conversation with

Horizon

, the interaction with

The Quiet

and the histories unholding. Obviously I'm not saying I want a clear and concise exposition dump, but I'd prefer the drip-feeding or lore to be delivered in a more accessible way.

Hadrian's

second sight

and ability to avoid death, while fun, is starting to take a lot of stakes away from the story. The Dune series had the exact same issue with

Paul and Leto II's Omniscience

. When you have a character that is so overpowered that he always escapes death, it removes a lot of stakes when their life is being put on the line. How I would have dealt with this would be to focus on other stakes, such as their own power being used against them in a manipulation or people close to them possibly dying.

Nobody significantly close to Hadrian died in this book, and nobody (except for Valka) made me think they'd die either.

I liked some parts of Valka's character development, but wasn't a fan of some parts.
I felt like Ruocchio thought Valka was in the way of the story he was trying to tell and kept pushing her aside and out of the way. I think she's a brilliant character, and I wished she was present more.

I wish Alexander was worked on more, he was present at times in this book, there were some character growth moments, but he also felt very absent from the book too. I thought, as Hadrian's squire, he'd be shadowing him everywhere, that wasn't the case at all.

But yes, I do think there was less of a focus on certain characters and there was a lot more plot contrivances. And yet, I fucking loved this book 🤯
Despite these issues, this is still one of my favourite books! I'm so stoked for the next book! 🥳