The prose is good, and the story is interesting and told in an interesting format, but personally it falls flat. It’s not super memorable, and it’s only at the very end of the book that we actually reach the main conflict.

The book is more about the individual character’s conflicts, and is told in a way where each character influences the story and passes the torch to another character to continue the story until it reaches our first character again, now an old grandmother. Which I think is the main message of the story: each person has their own arc and choices and regrets that affect the grand story.

It’s interesting that each character has a decision they regret; Holly regrets leaving Jacko, Hugo wonders if he could have had love over immortality, Ed regrets leaving his family and causing the deaths of his handlers, and Crispin Hershey regrets exacting veneance on his critic by putting him in a foreign prison for three years. Unfortunately, getting invested in each character’s story only for them to literally disappear (magically) or die gets tiresome, and the main payoff is that at the end of the story, Holly is able to send her granchildren somewhere safe, while she is left to die in Climate Change hell.

*Writer inserts modern culture war themes into literature in a semi-feasible way that isn’t too painful to read.