I received an eARC of this book through the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
I loved Chloe Gong’s first YA duology, so I naturally jumped at the chance to read her adult debut. The premise of this book is really compelling, but I felt like the execution just didn’t quite reach its full potential. I struggled through the first third of the book, but once the action picked up and Anton and Calla were finally in each other’s main orbit, I found myself more compelled.
I felt like we either needed to delve into the crescent society subplot more, or we needed more of August’s POV to show his motivations for his actions because I got tired of this book dropping bits and pieces of compelling side plots in and never delivering on developing those side plots fully. So much was being orchestrated outside of Anton and Calla’s awareness, and I wish we had gotten more than brief glimpses interspersed around their perspectives. The tendency to swap whose perspective was being described mid-chapter threw me off multiple times and made understanding the difference between Anton and August, two men with ‘A’ names and black eyes, really difficult in the beginning. Eventually, their perspectives and involvements were different enough for me to tell them apart, but in the first quarter of the book, I was constantly confused by whose perspective I was reading.
The first big twist had me immediately needing to read more, but when I thought about it, it made absolutely no sense within the rules of the world Gong has set up, for the exact same reasons that the final twist works so well. I couldn’t focus on the second main twist and struggled to fully appreciate the final twist because I just kept going back to how the first main twist made no sense and didn’t work. Hopefully, it gets explained further in the next two books, but I was majorly thrown off by the rules established throughout the book being thrown out the window because it made multiple things that happened prior fall apart.
I’m interested to see whether books two and three end up with a love triangle aspect, but I finished this book confused and frustrated enough that I’m not super likely to pick those books up when they come out. By no means was this a terrible adult debut, but the disregard for the worldbuilding she established within the same book has me unlikely to continue.