Everything in Edenlost: The Borderless City is very immediate. A dual-POV story, it focuses on a mother (Evelyn) and her daughter Leyla. As the book opens, Evelyn has become worried for Leyla’s safety and uses a magical gift to determine that her instincts were correct and that something terrible has indeed happened to her.

The prose here is very readable, smooth, and easy to follow. That said, there’s an awful lot of conceptual repetition, though not in the sense of whole sections or actions repeating. Rather, when it comes to descriptions of the characters’ emotional states, multiple paragraphs will be spent articulating then rearticulating the same basic descriptions of how pulse-pounding Evelyn’s situation is, or how much dread she feels. Despite the focus on the characters’ feelings, there’s a damning lack of depth or personality to any of it. Evelyn’s worry and Leyla’s determination are emphasized to us by the book over and over, but are detached from any sense of Evelyn or Leyla as full people. I’m by no means someone who would argue that showing is always superior to telling, but here the emphasis on telling becomes an issue. When, for example, Evelyn seeks help from her neighbours, instead of showing her desperate search for help on page, this information is relayed after the fact alongside descriptions of the neighbours’ personalities, etc. Everything is urgent, we’re told, yet ultimately the narrative lacks the very pulse-pounding effect that it continuously attributes to its characters’ experiences.

All in all, Edenlost unfortunately has the feel of bits of story assembled together with no sense of character, personality, theme, or intent behind them.