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georgieem 's review for:

The Genesis of Misery by Neon Yang
3.0

2.5

There are some interesting, well written elements in here. Balancing "how to communicate space-bending scifi " without sounding pretentious has to be difficult. But for me, in fell flat in a few ways:

- The interludes overexplained things without adding much to the narrator's character
- In general, Misery starts out sounding too childish and jumps into their new position with very little doubt. It wasn't awful, but given how important that arc is to the themes, I wanted a bit more realism
- Death, and the cost of death, needed more time to breathe
- All of the characters failed to connect emotionally for me. I kept trying to figure out why I didn't care, and honestly I'm still thinking on it.

The lore, the premise, parts of the writing were quite good. This just read like a young author.