Thank you NetGalley who provided me with an early release copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I feel quite indifferent about this book and I will try to explain why.

Most importantly the things I liked: our main character. I have never read anything similar to this story and reading about a faceless, asexual, sentient blob was really enjoyable. It was interesting to see how it learned about the species around it, about its own species, about its abilities and perfected them, and most importantly about developing feelings and kind of a conscience. I also felt like its unexpected partnership added a lot to the story. The writing was nice to read; not overly descriptive but just enough to get the overall scene. Each chapter was kind of like a short story in the life of Faceless, which allowed us to see them in multiple stages of their life and see how they grow.

Now, I had a couple of things I struggled with throughout this story. Due to the chapters feeling like short stories in the life of Faceless, I felt like a lot of things were explained multiple times; again in each chapter. Now, I do prefer things being over-explained rather than being left wondering how things work, but I did notice how things were repeated over and over again. I also had trouble picturing the various species mentioned in the story. I felt like we got too little description of them and for some species we never got a good description until later in the story. I had a hard time imagining what the side characters looked like so that took me out of the story. Also, for a standalone (which, as far as I know, this is) I felt like the ending was quite open. Perhaps this was on purpose, but I do usually like a conclusion to my story, or at least feel like things have been wrapped up.

Overall I enjoyed my read and do recommend!

Thank you to the publishers via NetGalley for an e-ARC of this story!!

I never thought I'd find myself calling an assassin alien blob adorable, but this was really neat! His personality (I ascribed it a male voice in my head, but really who knows!) was well displayed, watching him learn "humanity" and growing bitter at the pettiness of alien politics was weirdly refreshing, and we learn a lot about the different species in such a small page count.

I have two small critiques - 1, for the most part the stories seem to follow chronological order except for the very first one, which threw me off and I think could've been better placed further in the story, chapter two would've made a perfect chapter one. And 2, the exposition / world building got a bit repetitive in some places (yes we know the difference between public and covert assassinations, why keep explaining it) and I think that word count, considering the book is sub-300 pages, could've gone to better use.

My favorite story was definitely the one where Faceless was hiding in the gardens watching executions, just eating and chilling. While he didn't -do- much, we watched him learn a lot.

I'm still very new to sci-fi so I don't have much to compare this to, but I think Faceless and Murderbot would make great friends.