I clearly have a large STEM bias here. But it’s also somewhat grumpy to me that Stevie’s thing is “I like crime” and Janelle’s thing is “I am a legit genius engineer/inventor” and Janelle is the one who’s a POC. Like, to get in as a Black woman Janelle needed to be smart enough to take multivariable calculus and differential equations in the same year (which…yeesh) but Stevie only needed to be reallly into murder and think she can solve a decades old cold case.
Couldn’t she have also had, dunno, an uncanny eidetic memory? We get some flashes of her ability to do some Holmesian deductions but it’s nothing, again, that I think warrants two years of tuition free education at a Choate-esque boarding school in Vermont. For what it’s worth I think the school is pretty cool in that its definition of “genius” is beyond the STEM basic–to be honest, I think this is basically a school for theater/arts kids with a token math person–and I would have been very envious of people who went.
I felt legitimately eerie reading this book while late at night and in the middle of nowhere, which I take as a good sign. It ends on a huge cliffhanger but I am assured that the plot wraps up in books two and three. While I’m not racing to read the next book, I’ll definitely grab it and read it sometime in the next month or so–if recent series are anything to go by, I think once we’re settled into the world it’ll make for a smoother ride as well.