If you've heard "Flora's Secret" or "Anywhere Is," you know that Ryan at her best is a master of playful, poetic wordplay. Unfortunately, a) Ryan's been off her game for the last couple albums (meaning, starting with Amarantine), and b) she hasn't figured out here how to adapt her material to the format of a novel, even one that's supposed to read like a fever dream. The prose is circular and repetitive and raw in a self-published way:
They say these are but the first words in a book of words. They say these are but the first words in a book that holds many other writings. They say these writings are of the night, and that they are words of love, page upon page bound in black, a black that is the color of the night...
Ryan's good at images that allude more than tell, that are sustained over the five minutes of a song, but in expanding her ideas to greater length and a more baldly expository format, her revelations become trite, and tableaux that are supposed to be heartbreakingly beautiful (how stunning and rapturous and brave it is that the Loxians found their culture on love of knowledge and the printed word, for example) come across as frothy insipidities (even more so when they're presented as stunningly original ideas). I did like the initial idea here of presenting the stages of one man's grief as a series of destinations - a city of constant grey rain that is either peaceful or dolorous depending on one's perspective; a "city of indecisions," where every road leads to a different one from one moment to the next - but too many of the cities are samey, and the execution just isn't there. The novel comes across more as a self-indulgence; the song, translated, tells this story better.
