Nightcrawling

Kiara’s own vocabulary is the sticking point for a cluster of readers: a high-school dropout narrating in dense, literary metaphor, and more than one reviewer says the prose itself “reads like undergraduate creative writing.” Kiara herself draws a sharper charge: readers call her “a perfectly virtuous, naive Mary Sue,” stacked with tragedy but given little agency of her own. After a patient build, several say “the ending felt rushed, unbaked,” missing the control the rest of the book earns. At least one reader stopped altogether, admitting “the abuse is just too hard to read right now.”