ARC gifted by the publisher

When Hero Tojosoa arrives in Prague to attend a bachelorette weekend hosted by her estranged friend Sofie, she isn't aware of the city's penchant for playing tricks on the unsuspecting. As Hero travels through Prague with a book, she notices the text changes depending on who's reading it to reveal fictional Praguers past and present.

Written from the perspective of a conscious & mischievous city, AXE is a wild and unique examination of blurred lines between reality and fiction, factual history and our memories. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, AXE took me a while to get into, but I find myself transfixed in this outlandish story as Hero faces some of the most absurd experiences on her trip.

While I only understood 10% of the story, I loved her brilliant examination of readers as "unreliable narrators." As a reader's life evolves, their understanding of a story also changes. How do we tell apart a tale's true meaning vs a reader's interpretation? At its core, AXE reflects how the permutations of our lives influence our shared history.