Eli Lang

I rather enjoyed this book, with a couple of caveats.

Things I liked:
The way the plot wrapped up. I felt like the story gave a lot of space to Luca, the MC with a disability who is offered a magical cure, to grapple with that decision, and I was very glad with the choice he made. The prose invokes a lot of questions of life, death, what we do with the time we have and how we love in the face of likely grief.

I really liked the prose for the most part. Lang has a deftness and an eye for detail and emotion.

I liked the placement of the story--Luca has spent years searching for a cure to his illness, and comes home when he doesn't find it. The rift in his relationship with his younger fey sister takes up a lot of emotional bandwith in the book, and I really appreciated that.

Luca and Kin as characters: I felt like both men had their quirks and their histories, and their romance was quiet and believable, especially in terms of how other factors (Luca's illness, primarily) affected them. I liked that the emotional conflict came from a really believable place, and that both of them were kind of assholes about it. The conflict felt justified, human in terms of its fallibility, and not manufactured for the purpose of the story.

Things I didn't like:
I felt like the worldbuilding rested a bit too much on inherited ideas of what an urban fantasy/fey world is and can be, which made it feel a bit thin and underdeveloped.

The pacing could have been tighter. I felt like we spend a lot of time in the back half of the book rehashing the same quandary without making any progress on it. While that does mirror my own experience of making large decisions, it was frustrating to read in quite such detail.

Kin's heritage. I really liked that he was Japanese but I didn't feel like his connection (or his mother's connection) with his heritage came through.

Not sure why we never met Luca's dad? We see a lot of Saben but it seems odd that he doesn't interact with their father at all.

The disability and potential magical cure felt generic. I could definitely appreciate the lack of a diagnosis or real treatment--that is in line with what many PWDs experience. However, it felt a bit forced that Luca would really be the only fey/human hybrid out there, and the only one to suffer this vague disease.

In all, I felt like this is a really promising book, and I'll definitely keep my eyes peeled for future work from this author. Many of my major problems with the book could have been addressed with a bit of a stronger editing pass, I think.… (más)