Haha yep, the title drop at the end was chef’s kiss.
It continues to baffle me how unphased the MIlone company people all are to the whole wolf demihuman thing. I’m not sure the plot would have played out any differently from their side if Holo had just been a regular human with blackmail potential from Medeo. I was expecting a double cross or at least that they demand some kind of NDA from Lawrence going forward but consider my expectations subverted.
Mmm. I guess they are described as being from a foreign country, so presumably the local religious rules don’t really matter to them except at a practical “avoid being run out of town” level. It does feel a bit wonky world-building-wise in places though – the book sometimes makes it seem like people just don’t believe in their old gods at all and the area is settling down into “christianity-equivalent religion plus secular attitudes and tech advances”, and yet people aren’t massively weirded out when they do find out about Horo, implying that they do at some level believe in non-humans, even if “not here, not very often”.
I’m a couple weeks late to finishing this out, but I have finished. I definitely enjoyed the book; it is easily the most complicated thing I have read to date, but it was the kind of complexity that I feel like I would have had to re-read some sections even had I been reading in English, I feel, since it derived from a lack of familiarity with the economic and, to a lesser extent, religious terms.
Overall, though I was a bit behind the schedule, I am pleased I was able to get through the book. I really enjoyed it, despite it being a bit of a slog in parts (seriously, all the scenes where we were sans Holo for a stretch were the hardest parts for me… Being inside of a panicking Lawrence’s head was an adventure. ). Odds are good I will pick up the series again in the future, but I’m going to give it a rest for now to first finish the light novel series I’ve been reading on my own. I essentially put that on one pause to push to finish this because finding the time for both (amidst all of the book clubs I’m reading and my usual day-to-day life) was rather difficult!
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