May Our Joy Endure

2.5⭐️This reads like the author wrote a manifesto and then tried to turn it into a novel by awkwardly sticking some “characters” in it. It will randomly go into passive voice, or out of the blue start narrating from the perspective of “we.” There is barely a plot.

The characters are very flat. It's not just that they are unlikeable, which would be fine if they were interesting...it's that I just didn't care about them. So much of the dialogue is indirect/paraphrased rather than actually showing the characters saying it, to the point that in long passages where multiple characters are talking it just reads like the author sharing his own ideas (like it truly doesn't matter who is saying what).

Some of the descriptions of architecture were cool. And what the book was trying to do overall was interesting, I just didn't feel like it succeeded.