Sixteen Souls

Technically a 1* but I rly adored the main characters and the tropes included in this book especially representation wise. So I wish I could give it a high rating but when I tell you that I was dragging myself to finish the book? I was REALLYYY dragging myself. I just did not like the writing and the amount of names, places and terms the author kept pushing out on me like

This book, was so incredibly good, I'm positively crying and I need the second book asap.

Shoutout to the lady at Waterstones, because she was definitely so so right about this book being good

[3.5 stars]

Holy SH*T!!
Wow okay.

So, this book was a reasonably chill, fun murder mystery (kinda?) with a gay disabled mc, a queer trans love interest, and lots of other brilliant characters, alive and dead. It was alright. It was cute. And then page 314 happened :0
This book had already discussed very heavy themes of death and violence, but after page 314 it entered another level I felt. The story had been building and building intruigingly until that page where everything built up for me and I couldn't stop reading until I'd finished the book. While, I do think there were some not very well-written plotlines and some characters that could have done with some more fleshing out, by the time I was gripping my book, desperate to know what came next, I didn't really care about that. (Although I do wish Audrey could have been a bit more of a character.)

So yeah, I loved this book. The characters were fun and diverse, the setting was ghostly and cool, and I really, really liked it.