Underwhelming progress into stagnation

This book had a dramatically positive effect on my health - that being, at one point it bored me so much, that I stopped reading it for nearly a month and I instead went into a hyperfixation rabbithole about working out and nutrition. Around a 100 hours of reading articles, posts and watching videos, my gains are legit. The book did not get any more entertaining, though.

Without going into spoiler territory, the underwhelming villain that was being built up in the last 3 books underwhelms even harder by being taken off the villain territory. The only possible escalation into anything interesting and a change of overall pace that has been teased as a potential evolution of the reality does not happen... well, any of the possible teases, really. This is the most "filler" book there has been in the entire series so far. The concept for the magical psychiatric facility sounded like it could be really cool, and it is instead underdeveloped. It's one of the better parts of the book, though.

It's just... excessively disjointed. It tries to do so many things, presents so many POVs, has now clearly multiple protagonists (with Omen being significantly more interesting than Valkyrie at this point) and none of them are really fleshed out enough. Multiple plot points try to be resolved at the same time, none to a particularly interesting resolution, some of them being perhaps included for the sole reason of tugging on a very particular set of heartstrings. Like, the Alice subplot is clearly made to tug at the parental/elder sibling emotional angle, but if you are the average reader, you have already gotten enough out of it with the previous plots that happened, and you are just like "ugh, I don''t CARE, yeet the child". That is the whole problem with doing too much really, nothing that happens feels impactful enough for me to care, as it is ankle deep at best.

If there is one positive thing to say about the book, it's that the dialogue and interactions (when the author doesn't take them too seriously) are still quite entertaining and witty. I'd say that the sum of the parts is the problem, but.. there is no sum is what it feels like, just a bunch of numbers, some more impressive than others, floating.

The narration is good. It was jarring at one particular point when a less heard character for awhile was heard and Degas' narration felt sorely missed, but it is still a 5 star quality of a narration.

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