A review by mikaiu
Metal from Heaven by August Clarke

2.0

a wildly ambitious book that didn't really work for me. truthfully, there were a lot of moments where i almost dnfed, and i was pretty checked out and skimming by the last third or so of the book. the prose was very stylistic and read like a feverish stream of consciousness that was hard to follow. i appreciated it in some places, maybe even enjoyed it, but in other spots i hated the clunky reading experience. much of the worldbuilding and explanations were either dropped in with small blink-and-you'll-miss-it asides or jarringly inserted through massive infodumpy monologues. i've never read another mapless fantasy book that was more in desperate need of a map. it didn't help that most of the side characters blended together interchangeably, each with multiple names, and all with personalities that essentially boiled down to "badass lesbian". the pacing also felt odd, moving at a snail's pace for much of the first half but then at a breakneck pace by the end. on top of all that, the summary of the book makes it sound like much of the book is about marney's revenge against chauncey through gossamer when this does not even become a possibility to the characters until halfway through. i did like how unapologetically lesbian this was but in the end this was just not for me.