I really enjoyed this book! I got a lot of the vampire diaries vibes from it (110% not complaining, may be team Damon for once in my life), and I thought the world building was phenomenal! I am really looking forward to the other two books in the series coming out this year, and I can’t wait for see what is in store!

You won’t be able to put this down- great read. Looking forward to the sequel. You’ll be captivated from the first page until the last. Wonderful story line and plot.

DNF at 33%

Let me start off by saying that I really thought this was going to be one of my new favorite reads.

Part 1 really pulled me in. The pacing was great, if a little more on the leisurely side, but that really added to the atmosphere for me. The prose was compelling and beautiful -- it felt like I was listening to an amazing storyteller as Amare narrated her life growing up aboard the Moonshadow. In this part of the book, her emotions, prejudices, and motivations are crystal clear - we know exactly how ambitious she is, we can really feel how much she loves pirating, and we get a good idea of how she handles conflict. She's 17 and has only had one chance to interact with someone her age and is basically hidden belowdecks, so while her voice does read as much more youthful compared to some other 17 year old YA characters, she struck me as insightful, capable, and strategic. I was excited to read how Amare would deal with her internalized sexism and her superstitions about and prejudice against witches:

"When I bled for the first time, I thought it was witchcraft [...] An hour later, it hadn’t stopped. Two hours. Two days. Nothing. That’s when I started to panic. Six days passed before the bleeding finally stopped. Six days of hidden laundry washes, of bloody cloth thrown off the stern and left for the sharks. I was in a state. Did I tell Omar? The ailment was clearly the result of magic; how else could a person bleed for six days straight with no clear cause? And was I its victim or its source? Then, three weeks later, it happened again. And again the next month. And again. No one explained menstruation to me. Why would a boat full of drunken men think to tell a growing girl such things? It may have been prudent to alert the Captain to the potential presence of magic on his boat, but it also posed a risk—as the only woman aboard, the men might well think the magic came from me. That I cursed myself. And if I accidentally cursed myself to bleed for a week straight, Lord only knows what I might do to them."

Then Part 2 happened, and I felt like I was reading a completely different book. Here's where I started getting vibes of a colonial and orientalist perspective -- why is it that the bad guys (trying to avoid spoilers here) and monsters in the book are named after words from African languages?

Even with the orientalist and racist undertones, I was willing to hold out hope -- it's not like consuming problematic media is anything new. But the banter and interactions between Amare and Finn had me cringing so bad from secondhand embarrassment, and the enemies to lovers dynamic that was being set up between them felt really contrived. Amare, who grew up on a ship climbing ladders and ropes and all the ship things, all of a sudden starts literally tripping as soon as Finn shows up in the story. And of course, he catches her when she falls, with, of course, a resigned sigh, since she's just a silly princess now I guess:

"Then I trip. Finn catches my arm without even looking. He sighs and pushes me back to vertical."
What exactly are we celebrating here? The fact that Finn can remain upright? That he has average spatial awareness? I've read so many similar scenes in books contrasting and glorifying men's ability to navigate the world (like, literally just remain upright) while women stumble to be saved. Then there were the legit tantrums Amare started throwing, which felt so out of line with the way she dealt with conflict in Part 1, so she came off as really immature, attention-seeking, and pretty annoying.

Based on how amazing Part 1 was, I have a feeling there will be great scenes ahead in this series, but the bad parts are bad enough that I refuse to spend any more hours of my life on this.