I’m giving it 2.5 stars rounded down, not based on the quality of the writing, but on how the book made me feel while reading it. And it made me feel really dumb the whole time, which was not a fun experience. I respect the writing style for what it was; I just wish I could understand it. I also understand that this writing style might just not be for me. Everything that I disliked about the book is probably the reason why others liked it. But ultimately, I just didn’t enjoy it reading it. It didn’t make any sense to me, and it made me feel really dumb. The language was so flowery that it was distracting. I didn’t know what it was trying to convey half the time. I felt like I was reading a different version of English.

There was no world building, which is another reason I was confused while reading. What is this world? What kind of people/species are they? What kind of lives do the people live? Is this a future version of our world? How does the sending of letters actually work? What is this war? Why are they fighting it? The book answered these questions in its flowery way, which means there wasn’t really any explanation. I really wish there was more detail about the world because that was the part that I found really intriguing about the book. I felt so left in the dark the whole time, and that annoyed me. So many metaphors were used to describe these things, but I didn’t even understand the real thing, so how was I supposed to understand a metaphor about it??

Furthermore, the lack of world building also made me feel very disconnected from the characters. Blue and Red didn’t feel like people to me, let alone women, so I didn’t even register their romance as sapphic. It felt more like two robots falling in love. I will say that the letters, especially once they became love letters, were beautifully written, and I could really feel the love between the two.