Reading this work feels like sitting on a wooden boat and getting rocked to sleep by the ebb and flow of a gentle river while you watch yourself getting closer and closer to the drop of a giant waterfall. It is dreamy in all meanings of the word : in the evocative beauty of its art, in the jumps from here to there to over the bridge, but most than all in the poetic finality of this eternally doomed relationship.

It explores terrible happenings and themes in a way that is neither casual or dramatic. Things just are. They shouldn't be, really, but they are ; at least until someone rises up and decides it is enough. There's a trove of amazing ideas and narrative coherence carefully woven in the theater style of the prose, not least of which the questioning of what happens to an established world when an invading force comes to set as law its own ideals on its victims.

I have many, many more thoughts (on the loyal dog metaphor, Swallow fervently swallowing, finding your identity not because of what you are but because of what you refuse to be, the black pearl of the camera...) but I'm afraid this review is already Very Long.

tldr : read Prince Swallow, but don't just read Prince Swallow. Think about what Prince Swallow says. Reread Prince Swallow then think about it some more. Just in case you missed something (you probably did.)