Seven Black Diamonds

2.5 stars

I like the concepts of this book way more than I enjoyed the execution. There were a lot of fascinating concepts left at the wayside. Eco-terrorism? Racism? Hyper-hierarchical societies? Lots of back-stabby politics? All of these were POSSIBLE and never exploited to their full extent. Several character were just... there and not explored at all (yeah, let's introduce a closeted, gay native american half-fairy terrorist son of a politician and not explore literally ANY of that.)

Somewhere around 85% of the way in Marr finally let Lily do things, at which point the politics snapped into focus and there were actual actions and plot points with relevance and consequences. But those plot points basically threw out the rest of the book– the not-really-love-triangle, the eco-terrorism, and really everything the Black Diamonds had done up until that point.

This was a really disappointing book.