The book’s definition of the ‘soul’ is ‘what makes you identifiable to yourself,’ which I could spend ages pondering and debating edge cases of. And the sole commandment for the world that is and the world to come, is ‘your lives will argue for you,’ which the inhabitants of this world have.
There are a lot of clever and sometimes-playful, sometimes-bitter-and-biting reversals of assumptions or common cultural/genre connotations, where the things the characters assume and believe are the opposite of what lots of irl readers would. There's a utopian bent to the setting, as well as the themes, but it mostly expresses itself in a lot of unusually-paced, detailed authorial curiosity about eg, what the core meaning of something like the power to create from one's soul is, when completely divorced from something like "what use does it have." Or what desire to know something could be so intense you’d pay anything to see it. Or, if a traumatic, intense suffering you experienced was immediately acknowledged, rectified, and the world remade to ensure that no one else would suffer so, would you ever heal from it or grow at all even then.
A lot of the main plot seems to conclude by the end of this book, but that's deceptive, as the plot and interactions also stand as a sort of petri-dish proof-of-concept for larger and larger ideas and conflicting worldbuilding elements for the next two books.
main characters: a law major (miserable and lonely), a philosophy major (miserable and lonely and also bitterly disillusioned), a blind street vendor (blisteringly gleeful but just getting started), a fallen angel (delicate, needy, and rigid, also miserable).
minor characters: well-adjusted helpful roommate (annoying), irritable writer (one-armed, hot), multiple academics of various levels of competence (societally interesting), God (hot).
Favorite chapters: “She Hadn’t Known a Thing” “There’s Something A Little Dangerous” “The Idea of Her”
Favorite epigraph: desert-burned | the river its sand | bright as salt