Landing on a 3 star review to find some balance between 3.5ish for the gems deep in the core of this book that I really loved and 2.75ish for execution and a frustrating reading experience. 

I often question reviews that open with “I wanted to love this book, but…” because it tends to have more to do with reader expectation than the book itself — not to say this is an invalid approach for a review, but without knowing the reviewer it isn’t usually what I’m looking for. 

That said — this book is one that I really wanted to love, and not based on prior expectations. The story poses fascinating, nuanced questions about love and revolution, about where the self ends and the other begins, about forgiveness and intimacy and self-hatred, set in a rich world of ruined and/or dead AI gods and colonial repression. These are themes I love, and at many points I wanted desperately to hear the characters’ and author’s answers and musings. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to access those answers for most of the book, because the frame through which they’re presented was a bit inscrutable for me. I was occupied with basic questions about the worldbuilding and events in the first few hundred pages; once those were mostly clarified, the narrative enters some shared consciousness/POV switches that sometimes highlight lovely character moments but more often obscured who was speaking and who was being spoken about. Character motivations also eluded me — some very slight, vague spoilers on this here:

there’s a series of double-crossings, which I could never quite grasp, and by the end of the book some people have double-crossed so many times I felt frustrated by the question itself.

These prose & storytelling roadblocks prevented me from being able to really sink into the story and spend time with the characters. There were exceptions to this — in particular, a stretch of maybe 50-80 pages near the end that was really satisfying because it clarifies/reveals many of the obscured plot secrets — but that one was the longest by far. 

As a last note, I am a reader who enjoys a plot/world mystery. The Locked Tomb series is both among my favorites of recent releases in the genre and attempts many of the same tricks as Archive Undying. A key difference, I think, is that in the Locked Tomb books I know what I don’t know and what world/characters questions I should be speculating about, which turns the lack of knowledge into an intriguing mystery. I point this out to say that I am definitely in the prime audience for Archive Undying, but it didn’t quite achieve its potential for me.