julio-alexi genao

*wearily removes eyeglasses and pinches bridge of nose*This book.The good:✅ Fun premise.✅ Cute MC.✅ Compelling love interest.The bad:❎ A villain who spends 99 percent of the story off-screen, who is summarily defeated when someone presses a button.❎ Typical American schizophrenia about sexuality (he's a teen, fucking a man, but we can't see him lose his virginity because actual teens—with their pure and unblemished vocabularies and finely tempered grasp of the profane—might read about it, and be soiled). ❎ The kitchen-sink approach to speculative storytelling: hey, you know what would be TOTALLY AWESOME? Let's give him the glorious destiny of presumptive dictatorship over two planets AND a magic earring that can sense imminent danger across interstellar distances without any determinable technological explanation, BECAUSE EHRMERGHERD.❎ A cover that is a perverse stock-photo bacchanal more akin to art made from the entrails of roadkill than anything indicative of even basic montage competence.❎ And the "Silent One" is silent for, like, five minutes, once, on page ten?...But mostly I'm annoyed because there's no fucking.So.