sunflower_emily98's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
kim_lommaert's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Content Warnings
Moderate: Kidnapping, Death, Death of parent, Blood, and Violence
bchantele15's review against another edition
adventurous
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
jaballes's review against another edition
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
Verdict: Definitely skip. A disappointing start to a trilogy that only gets worse from here. Some alternatives for better reads:
- For queer YA fantasy—Alex London's work or Aiden Thomas' "Cemetery Boys" (not without its flaws, but much better than this)
- For alternate-world urban fantasy—Jonathan Stroud's work.
- For dark, emotional queer-heavy fantasy series—N. K. Jemisin's series, all of them
—————
A queer Latine-heavy fantasy epic by an author whose books I've previously enjoyed? This should have been a slam dunk. And yet.
"Infinity Son" takes place in an alternate NYC where people have powers, whether by birth (celestials) or by taking potions made with the blood of magical creatures (specters), while much of the population lives in fear of their war. A somewhat promising concept is squandered with thin and sometimes unlikeable characters, ham-fisted social commentary, and a bizarre combination of silly terms with a relentlessly bleak story.
The main characters are twins Emil and Brighton. Emil is barely more than the chosen one/unwilling hero archetype, but it plays reasonably well. Brighton starts off well as the jealous brother, but his descriptions and inner dialogue gets flatter and flatter as we go, making his chapters really annoying to read by the end. He's whatever the opposite of character development is.
We're later introduced to some of the other Spell Walkers (our good guys, each with one, maybe two personality traits) and Blood Casters (our power-hungry, underdeveloped baddies; seriously, June is framed as this great threat, but we know literally nothing about her). There's one character that somewhat bridges this gap, and while they do have the best character arc, it's still not terribly inspiring. Emil also trusts them out of nowhere because... I guess the plot demands it? For everybody else, Silvera somehow mistakes a tragic story for character development, repeating the technique with just about every character.
The plot is fine at best in that it moves along at a steady clip, but only by relying on cliché far too often. It's also frequently undone by suspense that's resolved far too quickly or by characters randomly giving summaries of things we've already seen happen. That's not even getting to the tired
Spoiler
"your special powers are because you were adopted"There are some positives. The book is action-packed and often, the set pieces are decently entertaining. They don't fully make sense as a plot, but as individual scenes they're not bad.
The social critique is handled with all the grace and subtlety of a car crash. Many other stories have grappled with this concept of "normal" people seeking to control those with superpowers. Try The Incredibles or Jemisin's "Broken Earth" trilogy for better examples. Here, there's a presidential election going on in the background, an obvious parallel to the 2016 election. The candidates represent Clinton and Trump in their most one-dimensional versions. There seems to be a tortured attempt to equate fear of those with powers with homophobia and racism, with "gleamphobia" thrown around a few times. We've also got gun violence replaced with, get this, wand violence. There's even a right-wing talk show host spewing nonsense about this. While some moments are almost interesting, try X-Men for a better take on this concept.
One risk with alternate-world fantasy is in clarifying what the differences and similarities are between our world and this one. Silvera did this just fine in "They Both Die At The End," which felt just close enough to our world that we didn't need to get any background. Here, there's a mess of references to social media platforms and presidential/vice-presidential candidates who all seem to be from New York (yet nary a mention of whoever the current president might be). The similarities continue with all kinds of name-dropping of companies (every social media you can think of, and Lyft), while we also managed to learn next to nothing about, for example, any of the magical creatures.
I also have to add how weird it is to see a story full of trauma, grief, many brutal murders, and all kinds of downbeat plotting also be full of silly words and names like Congresswoman Sunstar, gleamcraft (unclear why he didn't use "magic," but whatever), gem grenades, a thousand phoenix names, and constellation names like Crowned Dreamer. If it sounds tonally inconsistent, it is. In addition to this and the random mid-story summarizing mentioned earlier, Silvera's dialogue is awkward half the time, whether it's in his attempt to give us exposition or in his mangled attempts to have these fantasy world teens sound like teens.
Despite all this, and because of the cheap (if predictable) cliffhanger at the end, I was invested enough to pick up the second book. I will review that later, but let me tell you now: it was a mistake to continue.
P.S.: I cannot emphasize enough how annoying Brighton is. You can have a deeply flawed, morally bankrupt character that's interesting. Brighton is... not it.
Worldbuilding/Setting: 2*
Characters: 2*
Plot: 3*
Writing: 2.5*
Vibes: 2.5*
vivianne's review against another edition
2.0
Spoiler free review!
Note: This book was in many ways not for me. That’s why during listening to the audiobook I kept getting bored and distracted and due to this could have missed details of the story. This might have affected my opinion.
- I despised one of the brothers soooo much. I never actually have this, I always see some good points in characters, especially when I’m in their head. But this was just on a whole other level. I really hated him. Self-centered, full of himself, better than anyone, jealous, could only see the negative of everything, pulling the whole world down and himself up, making mistake after mistake and never saying sorry or owning up to them. He was like a five year old not getting his way, the whole freaking book! Every time I was reading his POV my eyes were hurting from the amount of eye rolling I was doing. But my biggest problem with Brighton was that he was too fame-hungry. Which was besides super annoying to read about also something that I can’t identify myself with, making it hard to feel for him and understand him.
- I did like the other brother but he wasn’t enough to save this book. And he was also quite boring, super naive, too forgiving and not defining enough.
- I hated that the “bad guy” of this story wasn’t very well explained. There were no motives explained, no background story. Well a tiny bit but that didn’t convince me. This made this book very flat in my opinion and made me not care about it at all.
- The plot just wasn’t for me to be honest. I had expected a fantasy world, but instead I got some weird urban super hero story. I am just not into superheroes, it’s not my cup of tea. But furthermore I am just not very much into social media and the way this world was centered around it. And since these two things are so much at the center of the plot and the world it was just not for me and contributed greatly to me not liking this as much. Plus that the story kept repeating itself over and over. How many times can someone get kidnapped by the same person? Three? Four? But also the plot was not structured well, there was not a very coherent story line that made all the events tie together. A little fight here, then there. At least there was action, but in my opinion it was about nothing? Plus that the story was very unoriginal and quite cliché. I have read it before; "someone getting powers and being hunted by another group, and the bad guy being power hungry".
- I also missed humor in this book. There were no jokes and no funny characters.
- I didn’t care for the side characters and anything surrounding them. They were all underdeveloped, flat and kind of boring. And that was really weird because most of them had awesome powers. I kept mixing them up, couldn’t remember their powers, found their background stories (If they were there) unoriginal and saying nothing. I didn’t care about any of them and would have liked them to die just so I could feel something. With some characters I had no clue what they were even doing in this story since they were just there, e.g. the mom and the best friend I can’t even remember her name. I also didn’t care for the multiple pov, and found all characters pretty much the same.
- The world was, besides not really my thing, also very underdeveloped and unclear. Like is it present day life? But with super powers? What made these powers manifest first? All of the sudden there are phoenixes. I did like that aspect but besides stealing their power they were not really mixed into the story that well. I want to love something and be attached to it and I just wasn’t in this world. The magic was besides very unoriginal and quite boring, not explained very well. What are the limits? What kind of powers are there? They are inherited? How? What is the difference between a spell walker, blood caster, celestial, Spector, halo knight? What the hell are these wands? What do they do? Anyone can just use them? Where to buy?It was all very unclear and also not my thing with the things that were there. But also the “normal” things that were there were not well explained like their flat for example or the neighborhood or city. There is so many information about Brighton’s channel and the amount of likes, subscribers and viewers he has, why is that included?
- The twists were predictable, unsaying, not defining, boring and not my thing. Read it a 100 times.
- In the end this book did get to where I wanted it to go, and hoped it would go. And this certainly explains a lot about a certain character and his actions. But for me it was a little bit too little too late (this literally happened in the last sentence).
I don’t recommend this book, please save your time or read something better. And I will not be continuing with the series.
Note: This book was in many ways not for me. That’s why during listening to the audiobook I kept getting bored and distracted and due to this could have missed details of the story. This might have affected my opinion.
- I despised one of the brothers soooo much. I never actually have this, I always see some good points in characters, especially when I’m in their head. But this was just on a whole other level. I really hated him. Self-centered, full of himself, better than anyone, jealous, could only see the negative of everything, pulling the whole world down and himself up, making mistake after mistake and never saying sorry or owning up to them. He was like a five year old not getting his way, the whole freaking book! Every time I was reading his POV my eyes were hurting from the amount of eye rolling I was doing. But my biggest problem with Brighton was that he was too fame-hungry. Which was besides super annoying to read about also something that I can’t identify myself with, making it hard to feel for him and understand him.
- I did like the other brother but he wasn’t enough to save this book. And he was also quite boring, super naive, too forgiving and not defining enough.
- I hated that the “bad guy” of this story wasn’t very well explained. There were no motives explained, no background story. Well a tiny bit but that didn’t convince me. This made this book very flat in my opinion and made me not care about it at all.
- The plot just wasn’t for me to be honest. I had expected a fantasy world, but instead I got some weird urban super hero story. I am just not into superheroes, it’s not my cup of tea. But furthermore I am just not very much into social media and the way this world was centered around it. And since these two things are so much at the center of the plot and the world it was just not for me and contributed greatly to me not liking this as much. Plus that the story kept repeating itself over and over. How many times can someone get kidnapped by the same person? Three? Four? But also the plot was not structured well, there was not a very coherent story line that made all the events tie together. A little fight here, then there. At least there was action, but in my opinion it was about nothing? Plus that the story was very unoriginal and quite cliché. I have read it before; "someone getting powers and being hunted by another group, and the bad guy being power hungry".
- I also missed humor in this book. There were no jokes and no funny characters.
- I didn’t care for the side characters and anything surrounding them. They were all underdeveloped, flat and kind of boring. And that was really weird because most of them had awesome powers. I kept mixing them up, couldn’t remember their powers, found their background stories (If they were there) unoriginal and saying nothing. I didn’t care about any of them and would have liked them to die just so I could feel something. With some characters I had no clue what they were even doing in this story since they were just there, e.g. the mom and the best friend I can’t even remember her name. I also didn’t care for the multiple pov, and found all characters pretty much the same.
- The world was, besides not really my thing, also very underdeveloped and unclear. Like is it present day life? But with super powers? What made these powers manifest first? All of the sudden there are phoenixes. I did like that aspect but besides stealing their power they were not really mixed into the story that well. I want to love something and be attached to it and I just wasn’t in this world. The magic was besides very unoriginal and quite boring, not explained very well. What are the limits? What kind of powers are there? They are inherited? How? What is the difference between a spell walker, blood caster, celestial, Spector, halo knight? What the hell are these wands? What do they do? Anyone can just use them? Where to buy?It was all very unclear and also not my thing with the things that were there. But also the “normal” things that were there were not well explained like their flat for example or the neighborhood or city. There is so many information about Brighton’s channel and the amount of likes, subscribers and viewers he has, why is that included?
- The twists were predictable, unsaying, not defining, boring and not my thing. Read it a 100 times.
- In the end this book did get to where I wanted it to go, and hoped it would go. And this certainly explains a lot about a certain character and his actions. But for me it was a little bit too little too late (this literally happened in the last sentence).
I don’t recommend this book, please save your time or read something better. And I will not be continuing with the series.
botanicfanatic's review against another edition
2.0
Queer representation in YA books is terribly needed but sadly all other aspects of this book utterly fall flat. The plot is convoluted and doesn't take a second to pause for the character development that it desperately needs. Characters take actions that do not follow their established character and major plot points are thrown in with no foreshadowing, and in a confusing, not a fun way. Also the relationship presented in this book is cringe and based on some pretty toxic tropes. The only thing this book had that I liked was queer characters, and those were so poorly written it was not worth the read.
gabydeppe's review against another edition
5.0
WOW! also, I need more of Emil and Ness’ chemistry. I’m sad about Atlas though. But this was amazing. I can’t wait for the second one.
shaneindeglia's review against another edition
1.0
I don’t often give one star ratings but this book was just not it. Full of whiny, entitled characters that I could not get behind. This “fantasy” clocks in at only 350 pages, and it shows with the lack of world building and surface-level character/group dynamics. The writing also relied way too heavily on switched narratives and alternated between too many characters for me to ever get comfortable with one protagonist.