AI Doesn't Hide Lackluster Writing, It Emphasizes It

Diaries of a Borderline by Blue Evergarden

Goodreads Giveaway Win

Pages: 178 Genre: poetry

Rating: 1.5 Star

This collection of poetry is about a woman in her late-20s who has BPD and is healing from her past traumas. The book follows the protagonist in a variety of perspectives, as it goes through the depths of the protagonist's struggles and the highs of recovery.

I guess I didn't look too closely when I entered the Giveaway; as soon as I opened it on Kindle, the cover looked like it was AI. I don't want to randomly accuse anyone of anything, so I did my due diligence here. I zoomed in on the girl and asked an AI detection website, which said it was definitely AI. I also reverse image searched the same zoomed-in photo, which gave me a lot of AI images that looked the same. I know that not every author makes their own covers, but if generative AI is used in one part of the book writing process, how else has it been used? When the answer needs to be "none," this is a concerning first impression to have. (Click here to see more about my thoughts on AI.)

Now, I don't know if this is the author's own cover or if this is a publisher putting an author in a bad spot, but — as far as I'm concerned — someone made a bad call here. Had I come across the book on my own, I would've just passed on it. However, I think there's a certain expectation of a review when you get a book from a Goodreads Giveaway, so I persisted.

Unfortunately, the actual content of the book wasn't that impressive either. I struggle to review poetry books, as I don't find that to be my expertise, but I know that I have read poetry that I liked and poetry that I didn't, and this one was tragically in the latter camp.

The poetry was incredibly repetitive. Sometimes repetition is good and impactful in poetry, but this just felt monotonous. The same imagery and metaphors were used constantly, especially in the first section, and it never felt like it was building upon itself. This made all the poems (which, while they were one body of work, they also are independent works) blur together.

I was also confused by the overall narrative. We are following a character who has experienced specific things, but it was hard to follow what those things were. Additionally, there were a few characters we'd meet or specific entities that would be referenced repeatedly, and none of these felt fully realized. It was the idea of continuity, but really it was just a collection of thoughts.

The writing style also just didn't work for me. It felt like a collection of sentences that were trying too hard to be deep put together rather than poetry that follows a rhythm or flow. The language also had a tendency to waffle between flowery and literal too much and too frequently, often within the same sentence. I feel like all of this really hindered the message it was trying to send and weakened the impact of the main character's experiences.

Had I come across this book naturally, I would've just passed it on. This book was really just not for me, and I'm really disappointed by whoever made the cover decisions. As it was, the book was underwhelming and didn't leave a lasting impression.