I received this free digital ARC from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

DNF @ 20%

Good god this book needs an overhaul. In theory, it's a cool concept. In execution, it's rough.

It seems to be about an alien girl who's lost her memory and is thrust back into her life only to realize she's in immense danger at pretty much every turn. This style of POV - where the main character has no memory - is hard to write and it's not helped along at all by the side characters hiding information from her or by extremely poorly info-dumping on her. And, unfortunately, that's how most of the story is progressing thus far: excessively confusing info-dumps that raise more questions than they answer. (And not well-written dialogue in these sections either.)

In addition to being an awful POV style, absolutely none of the characters are compelling. The MC is literally worthless. She does nothing. Takes no action at all. Shows no hint of a personality and is simply trussed along by the plot for the plot. The two guys the reader meets at the beginning had so much of the same voice that I couldn't remember which one was which. I won't even get into the romantic pining of a 33-year-old for an 18-year old.

Beyond that, the story feels like a ploy to drop as many 'cool cultural' tidbits the authors have learned about real-world cultures as possible. There are way too many times where real-world items are included and explained, which just felt like the authors showing off their 'worldly' knowledge, and then the unique world-building items are just name-dropped with no context whatsoever. To turn it on its head, there were quite a few references to colors, clothing items, and even slang that have real-world meanings and left me feeling very uncomfortable about the tone of the story and where the story was going.

To round all of this out, I have no idea where the story takes place and couldn't envision a lick of the world-building, which is disappointing because quite a large chunk of the story so far is explaining the visual elements of the world. However, it's info-dumped on the reader in huge chunks or described so vaguely that the words mean nothing besides sounding pretty.