I have had a really difficult time trying to define the universe this story is placed in. No matter where they are and what they are doing, I can’t picture the setting. I KNOW Anderson knows how to describe the surroundings, but the concepts he is trying to create are not fully fleshed out and with things like this, I feel like we need a much more intricate and comprehensive description of these surroundings specifically because we don’t actually have anything to reference them off of. The characters can’t just say “It looked like the Empire State Building” because they probably don’t even know what that IS. There is no way for them to connect what they see and experience to what we know. And BECAUSE of that, we need way more contextual description. Or, maybe, even some flipping illustrations would be great!
Plenty of YA novels use illustrations at the beginnings of chapters or even partially through a scene whenever the author feels it is right. YA books don’t have to be strictly texts and those images, whatever Anderson saw would have made reading this book so much less confusing for me. I do believe that every reader deserves to have an individual experience, but at least having a common experience would be nice… people don’t need to know every exact detail, obviously, because that would just be tedious, but every reader should AT LEAST be able to connect on the majority of the story - even if it is a simple as hair color.
Which one is it?
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