It's not that this book was bad - it's that it was so bad I nearly had to do pails to get through it, so bad I felt tired just looking at it, so bad I ended up leaving it behind in France even though the copy I had didn't belong to me. It's fine, though, because I'm pretty sure the person who owns the copy I borrowed hates it so much she'd rather it were across the channel too. 
 I couldn't make head nor tail of it: it's a weird unnecessary blend of wild west and Arabic folklore, set against a sort of steampunky backdrop with a low fantasy element and also a rebellion and this book just needs to decide what it is and roll with it. It needs to stop trying to be 4785478 things at once and cool its fucking jets. If you want wild west? Do wild west. If you want Arabic folklore, do it. But those things mix like oil and water. The historical and social construction of the wild west (colonization, the moving American frontier, and all of it very brief and ever-changing), plus its incredibly specific time frame, makes absolutely 0 sense when it's floating in a sea of incredibly ancient Middle Eastern mythology. Like what the hell are you even doing mixing those two things? 
 It doesn't help that this book is written in first person (ugh) with an incredibly generic heroine with an incredibly generic skill for firing projectiles in a straight line and an incredibly generic Snarky voice. I have a problem with all of these "omg i'm so snarky!!!!" heroines, and it's this: they're not fucking funny. There's nothing smart about recycled jokes and comments about people's clothing and this heroine being patted on the head by her male cohorts when she squeaks about being small. It's Amani, it's Mare, it's Clary, it's Alina, it's Echo, it's that awful girl from 13 to Life, it's Rose from Vampire Academy. The thing is that everyone thinks you can just bung in a bland heroine, give her a few "omg i'm super sassy!!!" lines and suddenly that makes her super feminist and current and relatable. It doesn't; it's difficult to create a heroine whose snark works. Snark needs to be written intelligently or not at all. I have issues with first person anyway, but when I'm stuck inside the head of some impossibly irritating protagonist with the sense of humour of a twelve-year-old boy, it's a green light to put the book down and move on with my fucking life. 
 Snark can be excellent, but you have to write it smartly. You have to write it dryly. You have to put it on a heroine who's not just going to use it as a smoke screen for her Super Soft Interior that of course only the strapping hero can uncover. I like it when a snarky heroine is snarky not because the author wanted to avoid being called sexist even though the entire book is sexist as fuck, but because it's a part of the heroine's personality; give me a heroine who can actually be really mean-spirited and sometimes thinks it's okay to hurt people's feelings. Give me a heroine that other characters sometimes tell to shut the fuck up because she's being a tactless asshole. I'm sick and tired of reading books whose premise promises "a super sassy, snarky heroine!" who's really just a doormat and has no personality outside of a few critiques of other girls' clothes. I don't want to be promised snark and end up with a bunch of childish, unfunny internalized misogyny. Give me a heroine who's prickly and sort of mean but also a decent human being on the inside. I used to be great friends with this guy who, to people he only half-liked, which was most of the people we worked with, would say, "I like you. I mean, it's not like I'd take a bullet for you for anything. But I might break a light sweat for you." That's half mean but it's also pretty fucking funny. That's snark, not this terribly watered down "I'm so feisty!!!" 
 (Bonus points if your 'feisty' heroine never ever utters a single swear word.) 
 This book, on the whole, was a clusterfuck. It's a crazy disorganized garbage dump, like my desk at work at the end of a shift. It's one of those books that's just pure fan service, catering to god knows who, with a vanilla love interest and an uninspiring rebellion (I like rebels, but only when they're done properly, and rarely are they done properly) and a dreadful, overly dramatic, sooper-speshul restless-leg protagonist whose face was begging for a punch. But there's one thing that we always come back to whenever we - we being my two-person book club - discuss this book. Guess what it is. 
 If you guessed the gold suit, then a jagerbomb to you. Cheers. 
 The gold suit. 
 the 
 gold 
 suit. 
 Just don't even get me started on the guy in the gold suit. Don't even set me off. Don't even ask me about it. It was so fucking random. Seriously, guise, what the fuck is the deal with the gold suit. I can't get over it. 
 The gold suit. 
 THE SUIT WAS FUCKING GOLD AND THEN HE LEVELLED A TOWN. 
 I'm so over this.