I really wanted to like this book. The premise is so cool, and the sci-fi elements were wonderful. But I just couldn’t enjoy it.

There’s so much exposition to the point where you don’t actually get to experience the story for yourself. The reader is told every thing the people are thinking and why, instead of getting to infer it and figure it out.

Everything is spoiled immediately before even the characters discover it, so there’s no real mystery. The only thing that wasn’t overly explained was how Jo came to find out that she’s the Chosen One, which just kind of happened. I was confused on when she figured it out since she didn’t seem to have a very strong reaction if disbelief. She accepts her role in stride.

Then there was the toxic positivity. Jo is the Chosen One for the side of the light, which is fighting the Lord of Darkness. That makes sense, but apparently any anger is on the side of darkness. So when one of her friends gets upset that another friend betrayed them and made them the victim of bullying, Jo invalidates her feelings by saying that her being angry is basically just as bad. People are horribly mistreated in this story and then discouraged from harboring any resentment, which is just unrealistic. Jo is always right and when people get upset with her they are in the wrong.

Jo also doesn’t have much of a personality besides being the Chosen One. There’s a scene where a character is raped, which is a really traumatic event, but it ends up being skated over. The rape is filmed and the narration calls it a “sex tape.” It is not a sex tape; it’s a rape tape, but the word rape isn’t even used once to describe what happened. Then the story moves on and we don’t see the long-term consequences of the trauma.

Another time, the non-binary character has sex with someone who fetishizes trans people and literally only wants to do it to see what it’s like with a trans person, objectifying them. Yet this isn’t brought up, they just have sex and that’s it, there’s not even an implication that this fetishization is wrong.

Many people seem to love this book, but I just couldn’t get past the nonsensical morality and over-explaining, and the weird dismissal of assault.

Fantasy is normally my cup of tea, but paranormal isn't. For that reason, I didn't have a lot of expectations going in. I honestly feel like the story had a lot of potential; it had an interesting premise and I definitely could see myself liking it. Sadly, this really wasn't a book for me. I'm not sure what exactly it was - like I said, the story had a lot of potential - but there was just so much happening at once. The writing included a lot of details about basically everything, and this may be enjoyable for some people, but it isn't for me.

The characters however, are great to me. They were very diverse, and also quite relatable. I have to give credit for the fact that both them and the story itself were inspiring, and for that I am giving it 3 stars. This book just wasn't for me, but I can definitely see other people liking it!

At first glance reading the blurb and seeing the cover i was intruiged. It seemed so interesting, but sadly this was not for me. I was more or less confused and bored the whole time. The story went ..but it felt bland? i didn`t get a real connection to any of the characters either.

A pure gem. This is unlike anything I've ever had the pleasure of reading before and you can bet Ms. Love has found herself a reader fan for life.

Everything about this book was magical. It's a combination of multiple genres, including fantasy, science fiction, and paranormal, yet it doesn't feel overdone or campy. It all works together beautifully.

This is one of those books I'll remember for a long time to come and can't wait to dig into another of this author's works in the very near future! Highly recommend.

I really enjoyed reading this book, the characters were great and I really enjoyed the plot and use of magic.

I am not going to give a bad rating to this book, since it was just not my cup of tea. I kind of suspect it maybe wasn't but decided to take a chance seeing other raving reviews. But alas, it is really not the kind of writing and story I enjoy. I couldn't get through the first chapter so leaving a bad rating behind would not be fair.

Thanks for giving me the chance to see if this book would grab me.

I'm typically very drawn to sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal, and the like, but I really struggled with this book. I feel like there were a lot of good ideas, but there ended up being too much going on at once, which made the writing feel choppy and disorganized. It often felt like certain scenes were rushed and fact-crammed and didn’t have the opportunity to grow for the sake of adding in another scene for the kids to all get high again. While I was really excited to start reading, this is unfortunately a book that I will not be able to finish. There were several concepts I wanted to see more of and learn more about, but so much of the story got clouded down by the main cast sneaking off to do drugs and complain, peer-pressure, and other immature topics and conversations. I just simply could not get invested in the characters or anything they were doing. While each character definitely had their own personalities unique from the others, there seemed to be a lot of blatant stereotypes that made the characters feel one-dimensional and harder to relate to. I don’t think this book is awful, but to me, it definitely felt like an early draft that could’ve used more elbow grease to smooth the story out, remove unnecessary scenes and conversations, and develop the characters more fully.

This book has a lot of representation in regards to sexuality and gender identity, which I find to be a major plus and definitely compelled me to keep reading. However, I kept finding myself disappointed and wishing for more substance in the events that took place in the story. There were a lot of really great concepts, I just wish it had been a little more polished and fleshed out.

I try to keep an open mind when reading a genre that I don't particularly love, but I just did not enjoy this as much as I hoped I would. There was nothing wrong with the plot. The characters were kind of interesting. Yet for the life of me, I could not follow what was going on. There was way too much background info on all of the characters, so the first thirty pages were exposition. We also kept switching perspectives between at least four people, plus Jo's journal entries meaning that we switched regularly from third person to first person. The most disorienting factor was the sci-fi/fantasy part itself, because the narration went into WAY too much detail about Jo and her Lightbody and the Council of Creation. Unfortunately, this was not done in a comprehensive way, and there was so much sci-fi terminology used that I kept losing track of what was going on. Halfway through, I couldn't bear all the backtracking and just read through it, even if I didn't understand. Obviously this didn't make for a fun reading experience.
It was nice to see all sorts of representation amongst our cast, but the extreme level of detail that we were given was just confusing. They all seemed to have traumatic backstories, which lead them to routinely ditching class and smoking weed. That got a little dull... it's also necessary to have a disclaimer warning younger readers that these characters are not good role models. I didn't like or dislike Jo, but so much of who she was seemed to be interconnected with her Chosen One status.
Two and a half stars.