I picked this up because I am a big fan of Lindsay Ellis's. The first few chapters were admittedly pretty rough, but once the action got going - once Cora got implanted by the alien - it got good. The central relationship between Cora and the alien Ampersand is really well done, and I ended up caring more than I thought I would. The book touches on some heavier themes - genocide, government incompetence (it's set in 2007 Bush presidency era), what it means to be human - but never in a way that feels heavy-handed. There weren't as many pop culture references as I was dreading at first (there were some in the opening scenes) - though there is a surprisingly poignant Star Wars imagining scene somewhere in there. There were some flaws here, but the way the book left off makes me really excited for the next one!

I liked the first one - and really wanted to love this one - but it was just okay. It's long and slow, and while some parts were interesting, on the whole it felt like nothing happened in the book until the very end. I loved the two main human characters (and the aliens) but I didn't enjoy the romance aspect at all. Really the only good things were meeting more aliens and learning more about the aliens. Otherwise it's a lot of dark angsty stuff, which I frankly just didn't enjoy reading about. There were just way too many interesting things that were sidelined in favor of Cora dealing with her (admittedly understandable) trauma.

I really didn’t care for the second book in this series, and wasn’t sure whether I wanted to keep going, but I’m glad I picked this one up! Cora has really matured since the first one, and the other viewpoints like Paris were good additions. We got to see the high language, and the sister alien species was fascinating and it was great to learn more about them. Once you got past the opening, this one also seemed to move a lot more than the first two!