Sixteen Souls

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

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

[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.