I'm going to pause this book for the time being, reached 37%. I was quite hyped to read this book because it has so many people that loved it to pieces. But as a person with a despairingly short attention span, books that spend pages and pages describing trees and then 3 chapters focusing on the joys of tree climbing will inevitably make me start skimming. The prose is quite pretty, but my mind is not prepared to read 70 pages of gigantic blocks of text that neither advances the story nor really explains the intricacies of the world.

I liked the overall story about a self proclaimed utopia (which is certainly not 100% true) with a society sustained by the energy of a strange quasi-magical invisible force called Marrowcore. I also felt fascinated by the dry tree bathrooms. Very reminiscent of Aztec dry toilets where the waste is dehydrated and later on used as fertilizer.

The story of a human from London that survives the portal jumping due to some unexplained means was great, but sadly left to a tertiary role. Similarly, the quasi-protagonist Berro is usually sidelined in favor of the POVs of various quaternary supporting characters. I have heard the final arc of the book is really good, but I am tempted to just skip the entire middle just to find out what happens in the end.

The Crossing popped up on my radar as an entry to this year’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off contest (SPFBO9). The blurb suggested an intriguingly different experience to most fantasy fare, and I held that impression all the way through.

The writing was tidy. I didn’t find obtrusive typos. That said, there was a fondness for complex sentences, and I occasionally twitched at the sheer number of participial phrases and absolutes.

The setting feels solarpunk, or at least solarpunk-adjacent. I’m not a visual reader and sometimes lost concentration with all the descriptive details. Infrastructure appears environmentally conscious with maybe a touch of complacency about it. There’s a frisson of uneasiness as to just what this “marrowcore” is that seems to power the world so beneficially and simultaneously has effects like a drug.

There are quite a few characters, and it took me a while to get comfortable with all the names. They mostly gave me YA vibes, especially Berro with his quest for approval and validation. We have several viewpoint characters, mainly students of various sorts, some more naive and trusting than others. I enjoyed seeing the fallout where their beliefs and values clashed. There was a fair amount of what I tag “internal emotional processing” played out on page, which strengthened my YA impression. Additionally, the storyline was quite “direct” with relatively little sense of other (non-plot relevant) events in the wider world, which I also tend to associate with YA stories.

If I were forced to pick (and fortunately I’m not), I’d probably tag this as soft SF rather than fantasy in how the speculative elements are presented and handled. (But thankfully, none of info-dumpy crunchy explanations that make my eyes glaze over).

Overall, a nicely presented and refreshingly different read.