Ryan Folmer

Felt very rushed. I think the author was setting up for a series, which is quite obvious with how unfinished the story feels. It uses its 300 pages to try to tackle too many issues, and ends up spreading itself too thin because of it. I did enjoy a few characters, but feel the cast could have been cut down quite a bit. There are about 9 different characters in the main crew, but only 4 get much attention. This issue is so pronounced I forgot two of them. The events in the story feel like they amount to little. Any character deaths feel somewhat unearned. I think the author was trying to go for sudden deaths, as a way to show the danger present in the book's world, but it just doesn't really work since (with the exception of the first) most of them aren't really all that sudden, or the character didn't have the buildup needed to make their death impactful. I do think the story could have worked really well with another 200 pages. The main problems were just that the author had too many things she wanted to explore in not that much time. Hopefully the rest of the series is better.