Prosper's Demon

Normally I'd consider it a red flag when a character speaks directly to the reader in first person and says, "You're probably not going to like me." It screams of edginess for its own sake and I feel like I need to settle in for something that's going to try so hard to be jarring and surprising that it fails to do so. And yet, that happens here, and I still managed to be surprised (in a good way!).

Fantasy novellas tend to be sparse, but this has got to be a record for describing the bare minimum of the worldbuilding, if there's even a way to measure that metric. But maybe because I was given the bare minimum to understand what was going on I wanted to know more. Hell, three of the main characters weren't even named and I was still hooked on their dynamics and interactions. But I was able to read between the lines and get a sense of the logic this setting operated under and understood that there was a lot of underlying history that we simply did not have time to learn about.

I feel like I just read a ghost of an outline of a story, and it was still so good that I'm not mad about it. I guess gun-to-my-head if I had to describe what kind of archetype it was I'd call it a heist even though nothing was stolen and the protagonist didn't fail? Don't worry about it, it's a quirky little book with a lot of heart and you can knock this one off in a day; give it a go if you're looking for a short read.