Sadly, I’m with the naysayers on this one. I liked Kai as a character and the setting, but everything else was disengaging enough that I couldn’t tell you about a similar event that stood out or even the major plot beats. That’s a shame because the first chapter really killed it. Then, it starts to meander, and it didn’t ever really stop, for me.

The writing isn’t bad, that’s what’s so annoying about this. I wanted to like it. It was just so slippery because I didn’t have the imagination to be thrown into an atypical setting and extrapolate what Wells wanted me to, in order to connect. This kind of writing never much works for me, unless it’s very evocative, and Wells is a pretty utilitarian writer. It’s the same problem Gaiman has in some of his works. He provides too little context, assuming the reader is putting on the fiction like pants - but I do not consume fiction like that. I’m already removed, so when you write from a distance I crave more detail, not less. I’m not here to imagine my own fiction, I’d be writing it myself, if I were.