Jan 28, 2025
Okay, first things first, Easley was just another way of pronouncing Isla right? I don't know why some people thought he was sus because one of the randoms misheard or misread his name. I thought that was just....another joke? Am I the one that's dumb and can't read? Anyway.
Overall, I can see why people liked it. You clearly know how to write. I think there are things I'm quite sure you purposefully decided not to do which impacted my enjoyment of the story, but I can at least respect that you choose to omit details and not write a certain way because you want to write the story that you want to write. I think that's always laudable.
With that in mind, I tried to reframe certain things while I was reading to see it from multiple perspectives. I think the interplay between Stella's childlike internal language crossed with the fact that the prose gets a lot more decorative is well done but at the same time I had reservations about the "why" behind it. When I started considering that she was broken/restarted/insert X sci-fi sounding issue from rebooting a wartime robot, it started to make a lot more sense in my head. I also like the idiosyncratic language of this story because it gives the novel its own personality. That being said, at times, I couldn't help but feel that you heavily indexed into some of the jokes because people seemed to be memeing them more (eggs, karate chopping, nukes, tacos, Shigure's balls, Bob, etc).
If you personally liked doing it, I think that's fine. I just feel the jokes themselves had very little effect on me after the first couple of mentions, and I found myself trying to read faster because I wanted to get to something new. The one that interested me the most was Stella's fear of books (a shock, I know). It's probably that I missed it, or maybe you left it up to interpretation, but I was hoping there'd be a bigger payoff for that fear and I never quite got it outside of the punchline when Stella runs into a library as opposed to just one book. The scene itself was fine but I wished there was something more...substantive at the end of it?
In addition, I kept feeling like I was missing a sense of "why" as I was reading. For a book titled after philosophizing, it felt like there was actually very little of it. There were some brief sentiments at the end of maybe 30-40% of the chapters, but it felt like that was something that gets dispersed throughout the novel through dialogue or more prosaic passages rather than as a kind of mission statement (I don't mean it that cruelly) at the end of certain chapters.
I'm sure to some degree that might have actually been the point, to be a fair bit aimless. Some books thrive off little vignettes that cohere to a kind of vibe. I think this novel does in fact have a vibe, and to that end, that's good. But the specific issue for me is the spread/uniqueness of these vignettes feels very...rote? I'm not sure if that's the right word, but the story kind of waffles about with a lot of the same interactions for the midsection of the book. Stella does something unusual, everyone is like "w-whoa," Shigure comes and calms her down, that's not really what happens 24/7 but it felt like it, and it probably didn't help that the snappy dialogue is *always* snappy. I think the stylized characterization is quite nice, but when half the lines feel like punchlines or gotcha moments, a lot of them read the same to me. Maybe the best parallel I can think of is that it sometimes reads like a sitcom on its 20th season and has run out of jokes (again, I don't mean it that cruelly).
I remember reading in the Discord that people wanted more descriptions. After I finished reading this, I completely disagree. A lot of actions are local to the character voices and actions themselves; it does not require you to see the living room or even the library where Stella is freaked out, it's conveyed all in dialogue. I think what I would have liked to see instead of more descriptions is more variety in the way that you handle dialogues in these scenes. There were so many times that you had "short sentence: punchline" or "joke about Shigure's hair (comment in parentheses haha)." The syntaxing of your dialogue, not to belabor the point, also gets very predictable. I knew what was going to be said before the sentence was even over based on the grammatical constructions you've done throughout the novel. I'm not sure if that makes complete sense, but I think trying out different registers throughout these vignettes would have really helped to differentiate them and make them feel a lot fresher.
This last chapter was good. The opening bit was something I wish I had seen more of in this entire story. Genuinely entertaining. It's a common bit that's played out very well in text. The rhythm and cadence read quite different compared to other vignettes and passages which was what made it feel entertaining. I think if you had more of that variety throughout the story, it would have hit funnier in other areas.
That's it. Happy that you finished this Lolo. You have your own sense of style and really know what you want to write, which makes for fun writing. Hope this qualifies as meaningful "critim" to you.
![Parallel in Two [Saga Cover]](https://honeyfeed-novel-images.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/novel_image/file/19959/cover_thumb_b4b8f013-ea32-4c39-83f9-8361adc49b89.jpeg)
