Book Review: Hollow

Title: Hollow 

Author: Jazalyn

Date: 2020

Publisher: Jazalyn

Quote: "A ghost spirit of dark's universe falls in love with a ghost spirit of light's universe." 

They can't meet or consummate their love; they pour out their emotions through some sort of never-quite-explained equivalent of social media. Though the poems in this e-book are arranged in a sequence as the ghosts recognize that they are at least communicating, there's not really a plot that can be resolved, according to the constraints of this piece of fiction. It's a pretext for a series of poems about adolescent yearnings for love at an age when love can't be fully consummated. 

Adolescent yearnings are of course as real as anything can be, and these poems express them vividly, sometimes lyrically. None of the poems is bound to a pattern of rhyme and meter but some of them have solid enough logical structures to be singable. 

Here is another book from an interesting new writer that expresses the feeling of being a teenager, if anything, too well. Readers needed to be expressly warned against the assumption that the "different universes" motif is not just a way of saying "We hang out with different crowds," autobiographically, since we're not told much about the fictive universes or whatever it is that allows the ghosts to communicate (they don't reply directly to each other's poems).

Could this book inspire those who are starting to think about making their own special "Valentines" for their own Significant Others? It's possible. Messages of raw yearning-for-love are not positively recommended before marriage, but part of "being in love" is that feeling that the loved one belongs to a different "universe," a lighter and happier world or a darker and more interesting one or something that makes the person especially special. 

To buy this book and its two companion books, visit jazalyn.art or goodreads.com/jazalyn.