Author: lehmony

Genre: Shory story (literary fiction)

What I liked about this book:

Stretches of this are just beautiful. The line about the wind across the man's face being sincere. The color of the woman's knuckles as she clutches them in anger. The way Aurora's hair looks. The description of fleeting places in the beginning. It speaks to a really good grasp of language and figurative speech, and these little pieces glowed in between everything else.

What I did NOT like about this book:

The rest of it was a pile of purple prose so deep it was hard to find my way through it to the end. I have complained about books like this before. You obviously fooled some people in the comments with the flowery language, but you are trying too hard to be deep and to set up all these cool metaphors and foreshadowing without really having anything meaningful to say.

The gas station is trying very hard to be some sort of metaphor for death, and most of the prose is trying very hard to be a metaphor for anything else. But there really isn't a story here past people stuck in a snowstorm and trying to redeem themselves from...stuff. It's not well defined.

The author also has a tendency to use words that are way too big for the context they're used in, resulting in sentences like 'Rambunctious DNA of the ambrosia-drunk nephilim', or sentences about people who have headaches 'behind their cranium'. Writing is not about sounding like you ate a thesaurus then got the stomach flu. Pare it back.

This story took a lot of effort to write. Probably too much.

Overall:

Stop trying so hard.

Rating:

4/10. I see talent, but this isn't a very good story.