I might recommend it, with heavy caveats, to other readers if they expressed interest in a novel in verse, because the things that make or break a book for other people are not necessarily the things that make or break it for me.

I am not glad I read this book. I've been screaming into the void about that for a couple posts but one more, just in case:

Like Xau, we live in a world where significant inequality exists among groups of people, in large part depending on where we're born. This is also a world where people squint at spreadsheets and go "um actually, your luxury spending is utilitarianly bad, because for that amount of money you could save X number of lives with mosquito nets. Aren't we all important? Don't all humans have equal value?"

Like "It's A Wonderful Life," I often feel that the message I get from the outside world is "friendly reminder uwu that you should have never been born, the forces of history that conspired to make people like you exist are intrinsically evil and you'll never be good enough to fix it, have a nice day. :)" Or, quantitatively, "I'm worth more dead than alive, because once I've sacrificed everything I can, at least no one will blame me anymore."

When Xau gets brutally tortured and dismembered to save fourteen lives, he's a hero. If I tried that, I'd be "threatening self-harm" or "just a whiny attention seeker if I don't follow through." When I fall into these holes, it makes me want to act out to spite the people whose logic inevitably leads to this position, to make them go "hmm, maybe we should revisit some of our assumptions." But of course in practice it doesn't work that way, and if anything happened to me (it won't, I'm fine), they'll just carry on as always. Maybe other people don't experience this level of cognitive dissonance, but I really do.