This had some really good moments and some moments thats were just missing the mark. I felt like some of the characters blended together and were quite forgettable meaning that if anything happened to them i was not super bothered. The two brothers were the strongest characters and the story should have been told just from their point of view as it would have made the story clearer. This was an enjoyable science fiction/fantasy book but it was not anything mind blowing or special.

This book is a hot mess. Dropped into the middle of some kind of alternate reality New York, I, as a reader struggled to find my bearings as several main characters with interchangeably whiny internal voices threw new vocabulary around with the expectation that I would somehow... figure this out? Celestials, Specters, Spell Walkers, all of these new words are given no explanation, and I was left reeling with no idea what was going on. Magic wands, magic powers, villains, phoenixes... Brighton, the main character, has a fascination with phoenixes and a scene in a museum gave us some context - plus I figured out over the course of the book that specters are formed by consuming the blood of magical creatures - but generally there was just a LOT going on here which wasn't at all explained. I still don't understand how, in a world which is so different to ours, YouTube still exists. Is this an alternate timeline, where magical creatures appeared at some point in the past? Or have they always existed? I am entirely unclear. The worldbuilding is, frankly, nil. Information is dribbled out, long past when it's necessary, and even having finished the book I honestly don't have a clue what happened. What, exactly, was the Blackout? And why did it make people hate Celestials? Who are... I think, akin to mutants in X-Men? I am so confused. But. Setting aside the difficulties (very real and disappointing difficulties) that this book has with worldbuilding, how was the plot? Well. Have I said hot mess? Because it was. Packed with tropes and disappointingly clichéd 'reveals', the plot stumbled along and ended with a horrendously predictable 'twist'. So maybe the characters were enough to save this? Nope. Brighton is a whiny, self-obsessed baby and Emil is dull and unbelievable. A little bit of angst, yes, I could get on board with. Some believably horrible people, sure. But Emil and Brighton, the two main characters, are dull, dull, dull, and yet also annoying. How do they manage to be so terrible at all times? Don't know. But they managed it. This book isn't utterly, abjectly terrible. It's nice to see a gay boy be the chosen one, and have untold magical powers. It's nice to see some body image issues which don't belong to a teenage girl. It's nice to have side characters who are queer, non-binary, and use singular they pronouns. It's nice also to have a main character whose defining character trait isn't that he's Latinx or gay. Intersectional representation ftw. But it's not enough to save what could have been something great, but is really just underdeveloped and confusing.

It started off alright, but then it just devolved into a mash of characters I didn't even care about . The ending was evidently a set up for a sequel, but felt entirely unnecessary, and literally read as an unfinished fanfiction. Actually, scratch the entire plot, the book's written as if a fanfic writer (which the author was) wrote it, with the reader seemingly expected to know who each character is. Heck I didn't even know that Iris had green hair until Eros (I think) mentioned it about that shapeshifter kid. The main antagonist barely had any build up and June felt entirely one-dimensional and her entire bit is 'A freak of nature'. That's it. I struggled to finish the book because it was just so boring. I had to force myself to read it because I had 2 hours to kill and it was the only thing I had, and while reading I had to set it down it was that dull. I will be honest, I've read fanfictions that do worldbuilding and character introductions THAT HAVE ESTABLISHED CHARACTERS ALREADY better than this book. Overall, please establish your characters and actually worldbuild properly before trying to introduce conflict. In the meantime, go back to Wattpad and try and glean some more writing tips from there. TLDR: This was probably a fanfic with names switched out. And not a good one. Worldbuilding sucks and character motivations are non-existant.