On a Sunbeam

 
 
On a Sunbeam

by Tillie Walden

First Second

2018

 

 

On a Sunbeam is a graphic novel that started as a webcomic. My copy was a present from my sister, and I'm glad to have it on my shelf. I've read and enjoyed several of Tillie Walden's earlier works, and this definitely feels like a continuation of her growth as an artist. My personal favorite might still be The End of Summer, but a lot of that's because I like the enormous Victorian house it's set in, and the tiger-sized housecat who protects one of the kids who live there.
 

On a Sunbeam is set in a space opera future, when humanity is scattered across far distant planets, moons, and other habitats, and travelers cross space in ships that look like giant koi fish.
 
Initially, the story progresses along two tracks. In the present, Mia is a recent graduate who gets a job with a small crew of women to rehab abandoned sites so they can be turned into new housing. In flashbacks, we follow Mia in boarding school as she falls in love with her new classmate Grace. About halfway through, the flashbacks conclude as we learn how Grace and Mia got separated. In the present, having faced her memories, Mia resolves to fly across the galaxy to find Grace again, a search that fills the latter half of the novel.
 
The story is well-paced. Mia's friendship with her coworkers and her love with Grace both develop organically. And there's good foreshadowing about the importance of a dangerous region of space known as The Staircase. Although the two timelines mostly advance separately from each other, there's a beautiful moment relatively early on when they sync, when Mia makes a bad mistake at the construction site that reminds her of a bad mistake she made at school. Later there are more flashbacks to other characters' pasts, one-off chapters that give each person more depth in turn. The present day scenes are mostly monochrome in shades of lavender purple; the flashbacks are periwinkle blue. And in both, Walden uses color - rich blacks, maroons, oranges, yellows - to scenes with a lot of emotion or other importance. Mia's fondest memories of Grace appear as full-page panels.
 
In many ways, the first half of Sunbeam feels like a story that could be told in today's world, someplace where young people can make a living working freelance construction jobs. Maybe Brooklyn or Detroit. We have girls' schools. We have demand to convert old factories and churches into apartment buildings. It seems to be taking place in a period of decline, or maybe in the rebound after one, when the population is still down from an earlier high, and it's easier to repair than build something new. The second half, with space travel, and exploration in a pretty hostile planetary environment, feels more overtly science fictional.
 
Almost all the characters in Sunbeam are women, except Ell, who's described as being non-binary, which to me implies that there are men, just someplace else. The main groups of people we see are the all-girls' boarding school Mia and Grace attended, the small group of friends (including Ell) who do rehab work, and later a women's commune. Walden doesn't seem to be imagining a galaxy where men don't exist, just focusing on people and places that choose to live apart from them.
 
Just like in The End of Summer, Walden's sets and backgrounds do a lot to add interest to the story here. You could probably use a lot of the sights from the comic as inspiration for a scifi roleplaying campaign. In the first half, the abandoned sites the crew fixes up are all beautiful ruins, and they raise a lot of questions about what humans did there before and why they left. In the second half, the harsh, bizarre terrain of the alien planet Mia visits while looking for Grace are simultaneously austere and breathtaking. The sights aren't necessarily the product of a lot of rigorous scifi worldbuilding, but they have an emotional logic that fits each part of the story.
 

On a Sunbeam chapter 1 page 11 by Tillie Walden

 

On a Sunbeam chapter 2 page 7 by Tillie Walden

 
I also love the sport 'Lux' that Walden introduces us to. It's played at Mia's boarding school, and she's a big fan. It involves the players all flying around the auditorium in go-kart sized miniature fish ships, navigating a series of tunnels, and flying through a rain of confetti they call 'planets.' We don't learn the rules, but she does a good job communicating what it feels like to watch it. Later, Mia's construction friends introduce her to a board game that seems a lot like D&D. I'm always a fan of imaginary new games that show up in fiction.

 

On a Sunbeam chapter 4 page 15 by Tillie Walden

On a Sunbeam chapter 7 page 6 by Tillie Walden

 

Was She Pretty?

 
 
Was She Pretty?

by Leanne Shapton

Sarah Crichton Books

2006

 

 

Leanne Shapton's Was She Pretty? is so lean and spare, it almost reads like poetry. The jacket copy acts like an unofficial prologue or introduction. Shapton, we are told, was inspired by finding photos of her new boyfriend's ex-girlfriend around his apartment, and set about interviewing people about their and their partners' exes. The book itself mentions none of this. Instead, we start with a quote from Kierkegaard, about being a link in a long chain, and then dive into a series of two-page spreads that pair a tweet-length sentence about someone's ex with a drawing by Shapton. I sort of assume the sentences are all true and based on her interviews, but I don't know that for sure.
 
The entire book is in Shapton's cursive handwriting, rather than being typeset. The drawings are almost doodles, composed solely of thick black outlines and no shading, the same weight as the text, drawn with the same pen. From the text, we learn the name of the person who has the ex, possibly the name of the ex, and some factoid. For some reason, most of the exes are former girlfriends of men. There's only one queer person mentioned. Early on, there is a chain, showing us someone's ex-girlfriend, then her ex-boyfriend, then his ex-girlfriend, and back a few more links. But mostly we get singletons, occasionally pairs. The facts are notable, but don't tell us much. I don't know if Shapton's boyfriend's ex is in here.

I know some people really like really pared down, cut to the bone writing. Haiku, in particular, is supposed to evoke a whole complete image in just three short lines. I've never been able to fully appreciate that though. Maybe, it's the sociologist in me, but what I wanted most from this book was more. More detail, more depth.

The people we're introduced to by name, who are they to Shapton? Her family? Friends? Coworkers? Her own ex-boyfriends? Random strangers who agreed to talk to her? Besides the one key fact, the thing you might say to distinguish one ex from the next, what else is worth knowing about them? How do they impact your current relationship? How does your current partner feel about the memory of them, the clues they left behind, their lingering presence? For most of us, stumbling on reminders of our partners' past loves is the closest we'll ever get to being haunted by ghosts. But I feel like that scarcely comes through at all, even though Shapton's starting point was grappling with her own jealousy and the recurring image of a woman she'd never met.

I liked Was She Pretty?, but reading it made me wish for another book, a different, longer book that uses the same conceit, but whose author allows themselves more words, more space, more detail, more art, more.

A Case of Conscience

 
 
A Case of Conscience

by James Blish

Del Rey Impact

1958, reprinted 2000

 

 

James Blish's A Case of Conscience falls into two categories of books I've semi-consistently been reading. The first is scifi novels whose alien species appear in Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials. While I think artist Wayne Douglas Barlowe chose which aliens to paint based mostly on their aesthetic qualities, I do feel like the books themselves have generally been pretty good, and they're mostly moderately famous (or were at the time) as well. Poul Andersen's Fire Time and Hal Clement's Cycle of Fire are two of the most recent for me.
 

Conscience is also an example of the subgenre I call Catholic scifi, which combines the trappings of science fiction - space travel, alien planets, future societies - with questions of morality, and some of the weirdest, most esoteric ideas from Christian theology and mysticism. I don't think the authors or characters necessarily have to actually be Catholic, but in most of the examples you could find, they are. I don't know Blish's personal beliefs, but the main character here is a biologist who's also a Jesuit priest, sent into space as part of a team to help assess the habitability and suitability of the newly discovered world Lithia. After this, the Jesuit missionary / scientist will become almost a stock character in Catholic scifi, showing up, for example, in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Michael Faber's Book of Strange New Things.
 
Blish also went on to write for Star Trek, and I think you can see similarities between the post-WWII future histories laid out by both Conscience and Trek. I don't know if this is his direct influence though; it might just be convergence. In the same way that later scifi authors, at different times, seemed to agree that the future would surely involve AI super-intelligence and a technological singularity, and later that present society would collapse and usher in a post-apocalyptic authoritarian state, maybe authors of the late 1950s were convinced that the nuclear arms race would escalate along multiple fronts until only a unified Earth government, one with no rivals to use their bombs against, would be able to assure peace. But Blish doesn't foresee utopia. He predicts that the ultimate weapon would inspire a race to build the ultimate shield - enormous underground cities that are too expensive to abandon, even when peace is achieved, but whose isolation from nature drives their inhabitants to mass insanity. But I suppose I'm getting ahead of myself.
 
A Case of Conscience takes place in two parts. The first part takes place on Lithia, the second back on Earth. In part one, a small team of scientists studies the first alien planet humans have with intelligent life, then debate among themselves what to report back to Earth. In part two, they return home with a single alien egg. It hatches and develops rapidly, and the young alien becomes a planetary celebrity, and a populist, a demagogue. Broadcasts of the alien's speeches cause mass unrest and planet-wide rioting, and it uses the opportunity to steal a ship to go home. The ending is ambiguous. Lithia explodes just as the alien arrives, which is either a result of its malign influence on its home planet, an industrial accident from humans manufacturing weapons on Lithia, or because the priest performed an exorcism on the whole species.
 
The first part of the book on Lithia and the enigmatic ending are what Conscience is best known for, but I think Blish shines much more in part two, where he shows us a suffocating, technocratic bomb-shelter society, and pokes at its vulnerability to a charismatic cynic who gives voice to long-simmering grievances. Even before the riots, the demagogue easily mobilizes followers to harass the government and shout down opposition - and all to the benefit of the provocateur, not to the people.
 
The Jesuit priest eventually performs the exorcism because he's convinced that Lithia is an illusion created by Satan to trick humans into turning away from God. I won't lay out his whole argument, but importantly, the Lithians appear to all behave ethically by human standards, with no crime or misbehavior, no concept even of laws or rules, no gods, no religion, no spirituality of any kind. A planet where there is goodness without God convinces the priest that it's all an elaborate deception. When I took philosophy classes in college, they were full of thought experiments like this, where something impossible happens because of a demon or genie.
 
I do appreciate that at no point did Blish refer to the alien demagogue as an antichrist, because I might've thrown the book across the room if he did. That was maybe one of the few ways he showed any restraint in the religious aspects of his writing. The argument for Lithia's secretly evil nature is incredibly elaborate and relies on a lot of really specific (and, to my eyes, unconvincing) claims about theology. Blish's priest believes in a young Earth and creationism. The Lithian lifecycle appears to him as (false) proof of evolution, because they metamorphose a half-dozen times between hatching and adulthood, and each stage mimics a stage of their prior evolutionary history. That cycle is what Barlowe chose to illustrate. It's a cool image, but it's not so easy to understand what it's suppose to prove, or how it supports the priest's conclusions.

 

A Case of Conscience lifecycle illustration by Wayne Douglas Barlowe

A Case of Conscience adult Lithian illustration by Wayne Douglas Barlowe

 

Witch Hat Atelier 7

 
 
Witch Hat Atelier 7

by Kamome Shirahama

Kodansha

2021

 

 

In the previous volume of Witch Hat Atelier, the girls took a make-up exam after Agott and Richeh's public magic use exam was interrupted by the Brimmed Cap witches, the ones who use forbidden magic. Their teacher, Master Qifrey, was unconscious in the hospital after being injured while protecting his students. At the end of the exam, Master Bel, who was Qifrey's own teacher, invited Coco to come live in the great tower at the bottom of the ocean, where she'll be safe from the Brimmed Caps ... and from Qifrey? But why would he say that?

Now, in volume 7, we find out several secrets of Qifrey's past, and learn more about his opposition to the Brimmed Caps, and his pledge to help Coco return her mom from being turned to stone. This volume feels like a turning point in the series. There's a little forward motion, but most of what happens this volume is in flashbacks. We learn more about what's happened so far, and also get some setup and preparation for what's likely to happen next.
 
We learn that as a child, Qifrey was a victim of the Brimmed Cap witches. They stole his eye, erased his memories, and buried him alive in a coffin. Master Bel found him, and instead of returning him to ordinary life as the witches' law demands, adopted him as his apprentice - just as grown up Qifrey has done for Coco. But for a long time, Qifrey was absolutely driven in searching for the Brimmed Caps, which is why Bel and Qifrey's friend (and his atelier's monitor) Olruggio are worried. They both fear that he's just using Coco as a clue in his lifelong quest for revenge, rather than genuinely working for her best interests. (Incidentally, if they've been friends since their student days, then Ruggio is a TERRIBLE choice to actually monitor Qifrey's atelier for abuse or misconduct!)
 
As a reader, I have to say I have concerns about Qifrey myself. He seems to be an excellent teacher, and to care greatly for his students. But he also erased a memory from the wand master, supposedly to protect Coco after she accidentally used cursed ink the Brimmed Caps gave her. And now he erases a memory from Olruggio.  It seems possible that he does have a secret agenda, that he is using Coco and the other girls, and that the way he acts with them is indeed an act. Or, maybe he is as nice as he seems to be, he is doing his best to teach and prepare them, and the couple now crimes he's committed really have been to protect the kids. I want Qifrey to be as nice as he seems to be, but among fictional characters and real people alike, 'nice' can sometimes turn out to be nothing more than a disguise. Time will tell...
 
Coco has a crisis of her own in this volume, because she's really starting to doubt that her mom can be saved by following the rules of magic that the rest of the witches all follow. Specifically, those laws forbid magic that affects the body - which is why there's no healing magic, and lots of devices to help people do things rather than spells that directly give them some ability - and the laws require erasing the memory of anyone who performs forbidden magic, as well as anyone who's the victim of it.
 
The legal plan Coco is following, this volume reminds us, is two-part. She's studying magic so she can learn enough to create a reversal spell. And also, by passing her exams, she'll earn a prize given to all graduating witches, a copy of any book on the planet, courtesy of the Tower of Tomes, which will let her find the spellbook she unknowingly copied the petrification sigil from. The only way to draw a reversal symbol is to know exactly what the original looked like.
 
Qifrey tries to reassure Coco that this plan will work. But Coco's crisis, her fear, is that the legal plan won't work. And if not, she'll have to make a choice. Is she willing to use forbidden magic herself to save her mother? Or really, is she willing to let her mom stay turned to stone just to obey a law she only knows about because someone else broke it by creating the petrification spell? It's a fear Coco doesn't dare verbalize to anyone, no matter how much she thinks she trusts them, though you can see she's almost bursting with the desire to confess her dilemma to an adult.
 
The volume ends with the students, Qifrey, and Olrggio all arriving back home at the atelier. Tartah, the wand master's grandson, arrives too. There's about to be a festival in town, and (although I expected he was going to ask Coco on a date) he wants all the girls to join him in operating a booth.

Crush

 
 

Crush

by Richard Siken

Yale University Press

2005 

 

 

 It's been a little while since I've read poetry, but a couple friends of mine both recommended Richard Siken's Crush to me when they learned that, and a third friend endorsed it when she saw me reading it. I noticed it also made Genrepunk Magazine's list of the hundred best indie books of the 21st century. (Impressive, since 80 of the books they listed are from the last 5 years! My personal fave, Clown Girl by Monica Drake, made it on there too.)
 
The combination of the title and cover art of Crush led me to expect it would be about desire, about the feeling of having a crush on someone, and it is, but Siken also seems to capture all the violent connotations of the word as well. There's very little romance or affection in these poems; Siken's desire is sexual, visceral, and the men he desires seem to want to both fuck and kill him, simultaneously, or maybe just to beat him up to demonstrate how thoroughly they disavow their own desires.
 
Reading this reminded me how homophobic the 90s were, how scary it was to realize your own same-sex attraction in the aftermath of the Matthew Shepard killing, at a time when so many of the seemingly reasonable people around you would openly praise or sympathize with or apologize for the killers. The men Siken writes about wanting seem to hate themselves and hate him, to hate him because they want him ... except for the ones who just hate him, because he made the schoolboy mistake of confessing his feeling to a straight boy who feels righteously justified in punishing him for being gay. "A Primer for Small Weird Loves" maybe shows this best, and shows Siken's own heart hardening as he goes from being the battered younger lover to the older partner, and the potential source of violence himself.
 
Reading this, it seemed like I could understand what it would be like to feel desire the way that Siken does, which is different from the way I feel it myself. It makes me wonder how common or universal his way of feeling is? Do other gay men experience their desire this way? Do straight women? Is this what it feels like to love men? Surely not for everyone, not every time, but is it common? Very common? Because I feel like maybe I recognize what he's describing, like I've seen it before, seen friends feeling it, at the start of relationships that seem almost self-destructive, because the men who inspire wanting like that are not nice men, are not good or safe to love.
 
The poems in Crush are organized into three chapters or sections. The ones in the last part all seem to be related to a single, fraught relationship with a young man named Henry. These poems are the most intense, the most violent, and it seems that Siken maybe literally took a bullet for the man he loved, who didn't know how or maybe wasn't able to love him back. My friends' favorite poem from the book, "You are Jeff," is from this section, and while overall it wasn't my favorite, I agree with them about the last stanza, the one that starts "You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you he loves you, but he loves you." If I could pick out just one thing from the book to share with someone else it'd be that stanza, but it's sort of unrepresentative, because it's like he finally reached the calm after the storm, the resigned acceptance of a truth he no longer rages against, the way he does throughout the rest of the book.

The Strange Library

 
 

The Strange Library

by Haruki Murakami

art by Chip Kidd

translated by Ted Goosen

Knopf

2014 

 

 

The Strange Library is an odd little book. It's just under a hundred pages long, but the font is quite large, and every other page or so is taken up by an image, so it's somewhere between a short story and a novella. The story within is never referred to as a dream, I think most people would call it magical realism, but the events follow a dream logic, and reading it is like listening to someone describe a particularly well-remembered dream. I would not say this is Murakami's best work, but it was nice enough for what it is.
 
The narrator goes to the library to return a couple books and check something out. It's the afternoon, and he needs to go home soon, because it's almost dinner time and his mother worries. But just like anytime you have a goal in a dream, obstacle after obstacle appears in his path, to delay and sidetrack him, over and over.
 
He can't find the book himself, so he gets sent to the super creepy reference librarian, who finds 3 books, but they're for internal use only, so they can't be checked out. The narrator wants to go home, but the librarian guilt trips him about the effort it took to go find the books, so he agrees to stay a bit late and read for a little while.
 
So the librarian takes him through a vault door into an underground labyrinth that supposedly leads to the reading room. Instead it leads to a jail cell where the narrator will be imprisoned for a month while he reads and memorizes all three books. And yes, there'll be a test at the end where he has to recite them verbatim. Oh, and his jailer is a man wearing a sheep costume. The basement that's larger than the building it's beneath is a recurring feature of my dreams, and probably a lot of other people's too, and the impossible test that's coming too soon is a classic nightmare scenario.
 
From there, our narrator has to figure out how to get himself back out. There's no cop out 'and then he woke up' ending here - although the details are all dreamlike, Murakami treats them as obstacles that have to be overcome with a realistic escape plan.
 
At least a third of the pages had full-page images. To me, it mostly looked like designer Chip Kidd chose graphical elements from Japanese poster art, and then zoomed in and cropped the images to make them look stranger and more unsettling. Their relationship to the story is sometimes fairly direct, but often oblique, and in only a few cases, several images in a row appear to tell their own sequential narrative that complements the text.

High Times in the Low Parliament

 
 
High Times in the Low Parliament

by Kelly Robson

Tor

2022

 

 

High Times in the Low Parliament was nominated for Nebula and Aurora awards, and NPR and Autostraddle both shortlisted it as faves, so clearly there are people who love this book, but I'm not one of them. My favorite part of it was the cover.
 
Lana, a slacker with good handwriting, gets tricked into volunteering as a scribe for the Low Parliament, a fantasy EU set up and administered by fairies. The fairies, who are universally bitter and vicious, want humans to talk through their disagreements to prevent any more wars. But it takes a ⅔ majority to pass anything, so parliament has been hung by a series of non-passing majority votes, and if they don't get their act together in a month, the fairies will use magic to have the whole giant edifice flooded by the ocean, drowning everyone. Also no one can leave without permission, or they'll also drown. Lana spends the book getting high with the fairy Bugbite and lusting after French parliamentarian Eloquentia, while barely paying attention to the impending doom. At the last minute, Lana starts to care, makes an impassioned speech, gets Eloquentia to do a little dance for parliament, (no, I'm not joking), and miraculously saves the day when there's a unanimous vote in favor of the dance.
 
So, it's like a fantasy novella that's a political satire, but with the plot structure and main character from a teen stoner comedy. If the finale was 'and that's how Lana got elected class president, therefore earning a A in poli sci despite flunking every test,' that would've been the appropriate stakes for both the (lack of) seriousness with which anything is treated, and the quality of the satire.
 
Also, arguably what really saves the day is a very timely political assassination. Because while the deadlocks are sort of the result of European (and perhaps universally human) difficulties in getting along and agreeing on things, and also by the stupid supermajority voting rules, it's also ALSO being sabotaged by the various Anglish delegates who secretly want the fairies to drown parliament because they hope then humanity will rise up and throw off fairy rule. I assume this is a Brexit metaphor. But in the last few pages, the fairies straight up murder the chief Anglish belligerent right there on the floor of parliament, thus clearing the way for Lana's 'technically there's no rule that say's a dog can't play basketball' buzzer beating victory speech. I'm not sure if Robson intended for 'political assassination accomplishes its goals, if we want functioning democracy we should kill all the populists and demagogues' to be the moral of her story, but the only other candidate is 'procrastination works, it doesn't matter if you don't care or even know what's going on for as long as possible, you still can accomplish something at the last second without really trying that everyone else has been working hard on and failing at this whole time.'
 
So like, honestly, the only things I really want to say about this book are all complaints, but to make sense of a few of them, I guess I need to give a little more background. Despite the back-cover blurb saying that the book takes place in the 18th century, Robson establishes early on that it's set in 1916. We learn early on that the fairies established Low Parliament in 1666, and that it's given Europe 250 years of peace. So the fairies conquered us, but mostly just force us to govern ourselves. One consequence is that there are no large nations or empires. The Anglish are just one of the occupants of the British Isles, not its imperial conquerors. Eloquentia represents Provence rather than France because there is no such unified country. I can't totally tell from reading this if Robson is an expert on early modern provincial history, or looked up a list of old principalities on Wikipedia. Both are plausible.
 
There are literally only women in the book, and presumably anywhere in Europe. Babies come from a fairy delivering an infant daughter to an aspiring mother who petitions her, and there are seemingly no men at all among the human or fairy populations. No reason for this is ever stated, no one seems to remember or contemplate an alternative. It's a fact that functions basically as window dressing.
 
Which is sort of surprising when you consider that in the 1600s, killing off all of Europe's men would've eliminated essentially all government officials and soldiers, as well as all the formal leaders of Christianity, collapsed society, and forced a near total rebuilding - which is never mentioned. Maybe the adult men died off naturally and just were never replaced by male infants after the fairy conquest? There's also no church or religion mentioned anywhere in the book. All this might go a long way toward enforcing peace! In the real world, 90-95% of the assaults and murders that are reported to the police are committed by men. A world where those guys don't exist, because no guys exist, would not be violence-free, but it might be a lot calmer, with or without a continental governing body. I mean, I don't know what would really happen, but a world without men is a classic thought experiment, dozens of authors have tried to imagine it, and Robson's answer is basically a shrug. It's a consequence of rule by fairies, something the reader notices but is never explicitly mentioned in the text, and seemingly has no additional effects of its own, beyond that nobody objects to or really even notices Lana's thirsty lesbianism.
 
The way Robson presents facts mainly as aesthetics, with no implications or consequences, might be a recurring theme of my problems with High Times. Lana's only two interests are sex and drugs. She gets tricked into becoming a scribe for parliament because a pretty girl offers to kiss her; she only notices Eloquentia because she's crushing on her. We don't really know what Europe's ubiquitous homosexuality means to anyone else, but for Lana it means that she's continuously horny, though in perhaps the most chaste way possible. She thinks a lot about wanting to kiss people, she notices when other scribes are kissing each other. But actually, we get almost no descriptions of her feelings of desire, no lingering glances, no staring. The book will state that two young women are making out, but Robson declines to tell us what it's like to sit next to them and try to take notes while they're going at it.
 
And for a drug novel, there's also surprisingly little description of the drugs of what it's like to take them. In the same way that the main function of the sex is to give Lana a reason to try to befriend Eloquentia, the drugs serve as a shorthand to establish her friendship with Bugbite. Lana and the fairy are mutual stoners; every morning they consume some of Lana's baker's yeast, every evening they eat a few flakes off one of Bugbite's mushroom caps. No, I don't know why Robson claims that yeast is a hallucinogen; I briefly wondered if she was thinking of ergot, but it might also be as simple as yeast being an ingredient in beer, and either Robson or Tor being unwilling to include actual real-world drugs in this, for whatever reason. Each time Lana takes a drug, we get like, one sentence informing us that she sees flower petals or some other hallucination, but there are no lengthy descriptions, no trouble telling visions from reality, no problems of any sort caused by tripping twice a day indefinitely. It feels like Robson was aiming for the cleanest possible PG-13 her premise would allow, like it'd be PG if she could get it, and the book is worse for it.
 
I'm not asking for purple prose here, or gratuitous dream sequences or sex scenes that stretch on forever, but I really wanted the book to at least pretend to care about its own subject matter. If Lana's high as a kite and horny on main all the time, then, I don't know, maybe tell us more about that as more than a simple statement of facts. Show us what she's looking at. Let us feel what she feels. Yes, go on about it! At least a little bit. Flex your literary muscles and write the kind of looping, whirling, flowery sentences that show us that something's important. Get rhapsodic! Give us a bit of poetry!
 
If everyone in your book is living under the shadow of death and nearing or surpassing their psychological breaking points from the tension, maybe show us that too. Even an amiable idiot like Lana should notice that everyone's terrified of dying, and that should show up on the page as something more than bland assertions that fear is being felt. Write, godammit!
 
Instead of using your 150 pages to repetitiously list the same handful of actions over and over, undertaken without the slightest sense of urgency, compose a smaller number of vivid, impactful scenes. This doesn't need to be a slow burn while the world's dimmest detective very slowly accumulates clues in spite of herself. This book should be a fever dream, and instead it's a made for tv movie, an after school special, conforming to strict broadcast standards. The longer I spent reading it, the more I wanted it to be something more than what it is.