I broke a little when they completed the journey to the institute/professors to find out they were all dead or in stasis, had been researching a completely different thing, and were roundly useless. She had inside information about this, and it wasn't even that he refused to believe her—she never told him! instead, she risked travel in exceptionally dangerous circumstances during a baby-determined time limit and... why....

I feel like that set the tone for a lot of plotting.

I found myself comparing to Butler's Parable books, and Black women have a lot to say about humanity's capacity for awfulness, but the way race intersected with a blood typed society went almost entirely unexplored; and that the worldbuilding set up sanctuaries in that YA "proper nouns and universal social rules" style and then ... violated them—in the case of churches, violated them twice—

The cumulative effect felt gratuitous in an unproductive way.

Thanks for the head's up re: Bel Dame Apocrypha! That sounds like a good plan of action for me.