This is a weird book. Maybe a case of the marketing being super incongruous with the actual book? It is far off from what I expected, in any case.

The setting and concept are interest. The communication of worldbuilding and the characterization of the Anthropomorphized creatures didn’t make sense to me, or else, they felt like it almost always does when people use animals-as-people: They want to make the perception of the animal and it’s nature the personality of someone. But people should be more complex then that and I think it almost always strays into weird/problematic areas… as it does here. There’s erroneous details that you wouldn’t expect as well. If the character is an animal the sensory information should be different than a person. Basically the characters just didn’t feel believable or even understandable. And then there was weird fuckin’ between “animals” that also added nothing.

The other major problem I had was sentence structure. The overall piece felt very bogged down because the writer was attached to run on sentences. Lots of commas and a shit ton of “and”s in the same way really monotonous first person writing can have. And then character dialogue was the main way you learned about worldbuilding, which seemed forced because there was no balance between that and “telling” techniques.

The dialogue was pretty good otherwise, though. Pretty weird.

I thought the mythology and fantastical elements were genuinely interesting. For those reasons, despite the fact I did DNF this halfway though, which would usually make me give something 1 star only—I’m giving it two stars. It has stuff going for it and maybe other people would be down with what it’s doing if they like the authorial voice.