Once in a blue moon, when reading this book, you’ll come across a piece of dialogue, or even a whole chapter, that is actually pretty well-written, and stands out from the text that surrounds it. One part that comes to mind is a chapter wherein Kathryn and her crew try to convince a drug addict to let them get him help and treatment. I felt like the wording and voice of this part was realistic and well-written, and was a pleasant surprise for me to come across.

I cannot overstate how bad this aspect of the book is. Many, many times when reading this book, I had to flip a few pages back, because I could’ve sworn that there was something missing, but there wasn’t. It feels like I stumbled upon a rough draft scribbled in someone’s notebook, where some pages have fallen out and large chunks of the story have gone missing, making the story near unintelligible. It’s as if Aspen spent three months writing the “super awesome action heroes” parts, and spent three minutes writing the actual character development and origin stories that make us give a damn about the characters in the first place. So many details are just skipped over; her bonding with her team, her going through training and orientation, her debating whether to join Raphael’s team–all are just glossed over in a few pages. Time skip upon time skip upon unnecessary time skip. In the wise words of Tyra Banks: “It is so bad, I want to give you a zero. But that’s not possible. So I give you a one.”

The characters themselves leave little to be desired. It’s not that they’re bad, ber se, but Aspen does next to nothing to get you to care about them, or get invested in them. New characters are introduced sporadically and with little warning. They are given maybe a paragraph of character development before being thrown into intense, harrowing situations with the main character, who herself has about half a chapter’s worth of personality herself. They all come off as shallow, one-note stock characters.

This book doesn’t appear to be playing at anything original. It feels AI-generated, as if a computer was trained on 40 different fantasy books and told to write a completely original. It takes elements from different stories, but doesn’t do any of them particularly well. This is quite a hard thing to describe without actually giving you excerpts. It feels so artificial at times, which lends to a very slow, uninspired reading experience.

This book had no problem keeping my rapt attention throughout. Beat by beat, I never lost my focus once while reading this. A lot of books–especially fantasy books–contain some slower parts that are harder to get through, and leave much to be desired. In “Alone”, however, there’s never a dull moment to be found.

It’s also achieved another rare feat: I don’t think I found a single plothole, error, or inconsistency throughout the entire book. All the details are seamlessly sewn together. Nothing really goes unexplained, nothing conflicts other parts of the story, and nothing is left for the readers to fill in the blanks. It hits all the barks for a good plot, while also maintaining originality and engagement.

Every character in this book that I can think of is interesting and unique, and brings something different to the story. There are no cookie cutters, stock characters, or cliché archetypes to be found. They’re complex, nuanced, and just generally relatable in an endearing way. Now, this is not to say each character is some sort of allegory or metaphor to some deeper meaning. Rather, the characters feel like normal people

I think this book contains deeper meaning behind it, that’s not essential to the plot, but can enhance the reading experience if you’re looking out for it. For instance, the whole idea of her being hidden from the outside world, only to be thrust into an environment of chaos and mystery, can be viewed as an allegory for hardship and adulthood. It conveys that parents try so hard to protect us from the horrors of the outside world, only to ultimately be to our detriment. And that once we are eventually forced out of the parental bubble, we encounter tribulations and menaces beyond our ability to understand. There are more examples, but the reader has the choice to acknowledge them, or just read it for the plot and the lore. You can get what you want from it, and I think that’s beautiful.

Alas, a good portion of my qualms with this book arise not from what is included, but rather, from what isn’t. For what I can only assume to be in the interest of saving time, Crane seems to gloss over and “yadda-yadda” his way through some elements of his story that I would have preferred he focused on. The major one that stuck out to me was that there should have been more focus on showing how Sienna acclimated to her new environment at the directorate. It feels like she just shows up there, says “hey, this is my life now”, and goes about her daily activities. I know that this is not actually the case, but this is the feeling that’s given, since there’s almost no time devoted to describing how exactly she got settled in. A well-written panic attack scene might very well have fixed this issue.

This one almost entirely involves the main character and narrator, Sienna Nealon. She makes a ton of wise cracks, jokes, and pop culture references that seem unusual at times. A lot of the dialogue comes off as unnatural and tends to break the immersion. I personally don’t think it’s that big of a problem, and I understand that it’s a result of her ignorance to the outside world, her only knowledge of non-maternal human interaction being that which she’s seen on TV. But other readers might not be as fond of this, so it’s worth mentioning.