This book has a lot of really interesting concepts and could be fantastic — with a few edits.
The world is obviously well flushed out, as are the characters. The culture is fascinating and I want to know more, read more. If I could get past the flaws, then I’m sure this book would be one of my favorites.
Now the flaws.
First, I had to scroll through 12 pages of content to get to the first page of chapter 1, on the book sample no less. A title page, then another title page, then a poem, then a celebrity quote, then a whole language glossary? It was overwhelming, and a bit pretentious if I’m honest.
Next, there is a lot of superfluous description and somewhat awkward sentences. It’s the kind of thing that would be fixed easily enough with a hard edit, cutting out unnecessary description or reading sentences out loud to spot when they are awkward. Minor stuff, really, and entirely forgivable.
The worst offense is the character perspectives. This is what caused me to put the book down. It’s one thing to have multiple character perspectives in a book — but this book has multiple character perspectives at one time, often switching between paragraphs with no warning. It leads to some serious perspective whiplash that ended up pulling me out of the story so much I couldn’t finish. It’s a shame, because the world and the characters are really interesting and I want to finish, but when paragraph 1, 3, 4, 7, and 8 are in one character’s mind and paragraphs 2, 5, 6, 9, and 10 are in a different one, and both characters have mutually exclusive thought processes, ideas, and backgrounds, it’s so confusing to my reading mind. This book really suffers from that. It would be better to have only one character perspective at a time, even if you switch with a paragraph break several times within a chapter. This instead ends up reading like the author couldn’t decide which character to inhabit, as if they weren’t confident their writing could accurately portray both from only one perspective at a time.
Maybe other people can get past that. I couldn’t. I hope the author rewrites to separate out the perspectives, even if I have to read the scene from one perspective and reread it from a new character perspective, anything really without the whiplash.