did I enjoy this book? yes, overall, I think. was it the best in the series? definitely not. the pacing was very weird (the climactic finale took less than a chapter, with very little leadup thereto), for starters.
Mehrnaz got extremely short shrift from the conclusion relative to Penn, despite the fact that she was a) a much more enjoyable character and b) much better characterized over the course of the book.
this book made a conscious effort to be explicitly diverse, which I appreciate in principle but would have appreciated more if it hadn’t been an afterthought and/or awkwardly handled; the reveal of Lissa’s asexuality in particular felt extremely clunky. I’m also extremely annoyed that, having heard that there was finally a gay character in these books, we find out it’s Matt, a minor recurring character whose previous appearances were so brief that I completely forgot about them. he has a boyfriend, apparently, who we find out about but whose name isn’t 100% clear until chapter 15 and who never gets to speak. honestly both this and the Lissa thing are just lazy writing: I want to like them both and to appreciate these aspects of them, but they need to actually have the time to...be characters, rather than to just be props in a story about Nita, who’s straight, dealing with pressures and expectations around sex.
make Ronan gay, or bi. (give him a boyfriend, more to the point.) make Mehrnaz a lesbian. have her and Dairine get together. just...give me something real to work with.
also I am begging you, Diane Duane, to let Harry Callahan and Nelaid get together. it wouldn’t take much work; the subtext is already there.
if you’re thinking, “huh, Nat’s not talking much about the plot of this book,” that’s because there’s not much to say. it was fine, if both weirdly slow and somehow simultaneously rushed. I’m mad that despite the S’reee and Rhiow cameos there don’t seem to have been any non-human contestants in the Invitational. that’s some (atypically!) anthropocentric bs.
most of the book is instead occupied by Nita and Kit being weird about their (admittedly new) relationship. that’s fine, but especially when the non-heterosexual characters are just being used as narrative props for heterosexual soul-searching, I just...don’t really care.
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