excellent premise, absolutely amateurish execution. nothing felt like it had any substance or stakes at all, and the writing was so, so try-hard. the prose reads like it wants to be flowery so bad without understanding what makes very stylized prose work so it just ends up being stilted and inauthentic, and the poetry……i can’t believe i have to say this at the end of the year of our lord 2022 but random line breaks do not a poem make! and the fact that it’s “in-character” poetry doesn’t make it any better; it takes up too much page time to be intentionally bad. all of it read like a 14-year-old’s first attempt at writing Serious Quasi-Speculative Litfic without any of the charm of being written by a child (i refuse to throw kids who love writing under the bus like that). i honestly wanted to give up the moment i read the first “poem” but it was so short and like i said, the premise sounded so promising (also i don’t have amazon prime so i did sadly spend $1.50 on it), but alas, i trudged on and wasted 20 minutes.