2.5/5

Many people will tell you to skip this book if you ask them about the best way to start the EDAs, and while they probably aren’t wrong, I believe that this book is more entertaining than most will give credit for.

The main fault of this book is its structure. Having a novel structured like a collection of linking short stories, when it’s the first book in your series isn’t an amazing choice as the reader is unable to settle with a single complement of characters, or a single environment in which more can be gleaned from how the new main characters for the series interact with it; a structure like this may have fit in more later in the series when it isn’t an immediate priority to flesh out new leading roles. However, even if this book had been written to fit in later in the series the structure of it would still result in a fairly low rating (from me at least, but I’m sure many would still feel the same also) as some compartments of the story are just too small and feel rushed in to have anything particularly meaningful or noteworthy within. As for other general criticisms of this book, odd dialogue and character choices aside, the story feels as if it happens independently of the characters almost – again reducing the agency and freedom of the main character in the first book of their own series is certainly not a great choice.

There are parts of this book I want to defend, with several of the larger sections actually being quite fun, with quite a few interesting moments and character decisions. Without including spoilers, it is hard to explain why I liked several excerpts from this book, but I will say while having a negative opinion of this book after finishing it, months later I would still find myself idly thinking about certain scenes and what they mean for the personalities of the characters involved (or just how fun they were).

Overall, I would probably agree that readers who aren’t committing to reading the full EDA series should probably skip this as it takes momentum out of the start of the series, and there is little within that is of great importance later in the series (I am writing this review while 30 books into the series). It is a book I wish could be restructured with a few little story tweaks; to eliminate the main weaknesses of the book and keep in the interesting segments.