Posted by I picked this up for no particular reason at all. I saw that Orbit has some new releases and so I just picked a few at random without even reading the description, I went purely off the cover.
This was an easy world to get excited about. I liked the premise pretty much immediately. Our main character is a first time mom with a newborn that’s a couple of months old. As the author mentions in her dedication, she’s a mom, and I think she really nails the surreal feeling it is to be a parent for the first time. It’s really difficult to nail the feeling because it’s just so odd, I can’t even really describe it and I’ve been there done that. It’s a mix of self identity crisis, insane hormones, strongly conflicting feelings that never seem to quite gel together, separate and different but equally strong feelings that pull you in two different directions. She really loves her work, she loves being a Hound and solving crimes and looking for lost people. However, she’s not at all ready to get back to work because she wants to stay home with her new kiddo. This wouldn’t have hit as hard if I wasn’t a mom myself, so your mileage may vary here, but it sunk me into this character’s world super fast since I related so hard.
I also really enjoyed the world building since there’s very little exposition in the beginning. The author does a great job of showing instead of telling. There’s a little bit of of exposition later as we do a deep dive into the worlds lore and mechanics, but overall I really enjoyed how this world was delivered. The main character goes searching for missing people in a thing called the Echoes. They are sort of like alternate realities and but it’s all layered. One Echo or layer down may look very close to your “prime” reality…but the deeper you dive the Weirder things get, if you go five or six Echoes/layers down you’re going to see some trippy ass shit.
There’s an aristocratic background to this since the main character is a member of one of the guilds, as is her love interest. I would have liked a little more here, actually. I know there’s a guild of Cats who work mostly in the shadows being spies and assassins. I know there’s the Hounds who usually work as detectives or search and rescue roles. I know there’s Ravens who usually are academic and study the Echoes instead of running rescue missions in them. However, I don’t really know how all of these interact with one another, who leads them, what life is like outside of them etc.
I like the fact that there’s a more modern feel to this as far as the writing style and speech. The word choice and sentence structure feels very modern-conversational and not so much period fantasy or olde timey speech. Personally, I tend to gel better with that kind of style and so I always get excited when I get a character who sounds like they could be one of my friends, it just makes it easier for me. I felt like the writing was super smooth and easy breezy, and because there was a lot of sensory writing that didn’t just rely solely on visual descriptions I got a fairly good head movie as well. I don’t like being overly bogged down with flowery or purple prose unless I’m in a very specific mood and so easy breezy is a-okay by me.
The pacing here was a little hit and miss for me. I enjoyed the small set up we get in the beginning that establishes the world and characters a little bit before we go full force into a chaotic plot. I was flying through this until I hit about the halfway mark, where it dragged for me from about the 50% point to around 75%. I did think the ending picked up a bit and to be fair, I read this in a day or two because I was audio booking and just kept it on all day as I did chores. I wasn’t super bored, but I felt like things began to get a little redundant and I was looking for another twist to keep things interesting.
I also like the demisexual representation, she doesn’t understand being attracted to assholes and I deeply relate to that. There’s a conversation she has with someone who likes to fuck this asshole who’s good in bed and she just does not get it at all. Neither do I, lol. If you’re a jerk that’s the biggest turn off there could be, you could look like Adonis and I’ll be physically repulsed. I’ve mentioned in other reviews that sex scenes really don’t do anything for me because I’m demi and I have to have an honest to god crush on someone before anything stirs, and that just doesn’t happen with fictional characters, and so sex scenes are just lost on me. It’s not prudishness, I’m typically bored. To see a demisexual pan/bi character was something I really don’t stumble upon all that often.
I’d recommend this to people who like fae stories, detective stories, LGBTQ+ representation (there’s a character in here that identifies as they), and people looking for something a little trippy.