Sacha The Human

this book is incredibly difficult to read. the slang is confusing and feels like most of it was written to say "look! teenagers say stupid sounding things!". there's very little context for what any of it means, and its really unnecessary to the story and most of it just sounds obnoxious. the characters have very little personality beyond the archetypes and role they play in forwarding the authors' message. especially the female characters. most of the girls that aren't the love interest are blatant stereotypes, the main topics of conversation being gossip and how they look. the main character is also kind of a jerk. he is constantly unnecessarily described as being turned on by innocuous things the love interest says, and the fact that he's being pretty creepy at the beginning of the book doesn't help. one of the themes seems to be that body modification is a horrific, disgusting thing. this is exaggerated in the description of "lesions" or cosmetic injuries that are (as far as we see in the book) harmless. the love interest even shouts at people for having them, calling them a "monster" for doing what they want with their body. as i said, the only real harm to having a lesion is that you look sort of weird. the equivalent in our world would be someone shouting at another person and saying they are not human simply because they have tattoos or piercings, which I think could be widely considered a dick move. another example of heavy-handed, ill informed messages is a section of dialogue between the main character and the love interest. the main character explains that his friend, link, is the genetic clone of abraham lincoln. the love interest asks what link is doing at that moment, and i don't remember exactly what he was doing but it was pretty normal stuff for teenagers to do. messing about, being loud, etc. her response is to say that society was really going down hill simply because a teenager was being rowdy, which is overall pretty common and has been a thing for as long as humans have been. so mostly, its just "youth bad, old people are good" which, for lack of a better term, sounds a lot like boomer philosophy. just generally, this book is mostly about how youth culture is going to be the downfall of civilization and overall that message is delivered with no subtlety whatsoever, and the slang just makes it obnoxious to read. I do not recommend it whatsoever.