Ya’ll @notlizlemon wasn’t exaggerating. This was an… experience.

This book absolutely hijacked my brain. I wasn’t reading it so much as interrogating it. Every chapter had me stopping the audiobook, rewinding, flipping back through pages, rereading footnotes, and questioning whether I was being manipulated by the narrator… or the editors… or both. 😭

It’s an alternate history dystopian told as the autobiography of a deceased psychologist, complete with editorial commentary from the publishing press. That format is absolutely genius because you’re never allowed to settle into one version of the truth. Every time I thought I had my footing, the book quietly pulled the rug out from under me.

The wildest part is that I kept forgetting this was fiction. Miriam and the Yuriatin Press commentary had me so fully invested that I started treating everything like I was reading an actual historical document. Then the book/audio would turn around and address me directly and I would physically lean back, bug-eyed, like “EXCUSE ME?? YOU KNOW I’M HERE??” The fourth wall was no more.

What starts as a reflective memoir slowly transforms into a deeply unsettling exploration of memory, trauma, institutional power, propaganda, and the terrifying ways “for the greater good” can become justification for unimaginable cruelty. The horror isn’t loud. It’s watching reasonable ideas evolve, one tiny step at a time, into something monstrous.

This isn’t an action-packed dystopian. It’s quiet, philosophical, and demands your attention. It trusts you to wrestle with uncertainty instead of handing you easy answers. I closed this book with more questions than I started with, and somehow that feels exactly right.

And that ending… absolutely not. I was expecting emotional devastation. I was NOT expecting existential dread mixed with psychological horror that left me questioning every narrator, every editor, every institution, and probably my own grocery list.

If you love unreliable narrators, morally gray characters, psychological horror, and dystopias that feel disturbingly plausible, PLEASE pick this up.

My brain has officially been put through the Watercolor Quiet. Get your hands on this one to find out what I mean 🫣🫪