The narration and story were good, but the repetition was not my favorite. Repeated lines throughout a story said in impactful moments aren’t exactly my issue the problem is more in when one character is talking uninterrupted but Klune broke it up with “He said…” For me personally, I can get really stirred up when something gets repeated so I was really frustrated by the end of the book, maybe reading it would have been easier to overlook. Other things like “My daddy said I would always get shit.” get repeated throughout the book but it’s usually separated by many paragraphs if not a few chapters. Sounds kind of nit-picky even to me but it just REALLY irked me to the point my head felt full and I wanted to pull off my ears.
Another thing that I wish was different was the scenery. The book takes place in one town split mostly between three locations and I got bored of it. At one point a character wanders freely to a bunch of unknown places but we as the audience don’t get to experience any of that adventure. We stay home confined to three locations… It was a bit monotonous for an almost 19-hour-long audiobook…
The explicit sex scenes really caught me by surprise. As a fellow ace person, I had expected any sex to be implied or glossed over but I was wrong. It’s pretty funny to me because if you don’t know there’s a joke in the ace community that we are all gluttons for smut but only in fiction not in practice. There were only two scenes and one is the epilogue so easily skipped if it’s not your vibe. Don’t have anything else to say about it I just wanted to be heard.
Overall a good long book. Liked the characters a lot. I will probably continue the series and I have already bought a physical copy of The House in the Cerulean Sea