Delaney, or Lane, is deaf, and so her inner struggles are not the same as the ones from fully abled people.

When she's offered a spot at an elite university program that trains students to slip between parallel worlds, she's excited for an opportunity to prove herself and show others that she isn't as fragile as they think. I think what I enjoyed most was that I felt like I was on the main characters path to trying to understand what was going on. There's also brilliantly done representation in the characters, they're not defined by their demographic tick boxes, it was so nicely done. She was like a paper cut out of a person, who did absolutely ~nothing~ but dress differently, and yet somehow could effortlessly walk through worlds and became the cHoSeN oNe for some sort of demon/monster thing (was never really clarified what it was. However, as much as there were elements of this book that irked me in the exact same manner that Ninth House and The Starless Sea irked me, in addition to the overwriting, I still loved seeing a Deaf character kicking ass.Because he had to say something, he said, “Are you planning to get into the elevator at some point today? Perhaps I’ll come back to it at some point, but no promises, because my experience reading these 100 pages was ~pure misery~. I’ll start my negatives off gently and that is with the fantasy and world-building aspects of the book.

Classical, not rock or country or top forty, because he'd been raised on Handel and Tchaikovsky and because sometimes, when he was very tightly wound, the instrumentals were the only things that eased the tension in his chest. The school aspect felt like it got dropped from the plot after the first few chapters, and someone with a more critical eye might find holes in the magic element, but this rating is based on my enjoyment rather than “objective” qualities about the book. The thing is, we never saw Delaney go into her room for the first time or meet this girl, let alone get close to her! We start off seeing her first lecture where she is given a 3-minute monologue about what is expected in the course and told to get some rest to prepare.In that aspect I think this book needed an editor, or maybe the final form of this book might be different as I read it as an e-arc? Andrew’s writing is so fluid and so beautifully vivid…the way she personifies and describes the dark.