Review of "Childhood's Hour: The Lost Desert" by E.E. Glass

Score: 90+/100 (9.0+ out of 10)

It took us a week to read this book. Most books take us 1-3 days.
We're still not exactly sure what we read. It's ironic that one of the main protagonists is literally named Loste because we certainly found ourselves feeling lost, bewildered, and wondering: "What's the point of this? Why are all these details here? What direction is this going?"

This book seems to make about as much sense as the last Cirque du Soleil show you watched. And we LOVE Cirque du Soleil. We just don't know what the hell is happening story-wise half the time. And most of the time, the "story" doesn't seem to be the point. It's more about the spectacle of presenting wild things and being different or special.

This book is surreal. It's dream-like. It's, perhaps, experimental.

It's thought-provoking. It's mind-numbing.
It's like a kaleidoscope of mixed, warped colors, concept, and ideas placed in a blender and set to puree.

It's like trying to swim in an ocean filled with water, juice, soda, vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, oil, and alcohol. You can't quite see five feet in front of you, which direction you're going, which way is up or down, all while you're struggling for air, your eyes are burning, and you have a sweet yet pungent taste in your mouth.

This is ONE OF THOSE BOOKS. One of those books that drops you into an alien world and forces you to figure things out.

In our experience and opinion, it's one of those books that prioritizes and heavily emphasizes the world-building and details to the point of becoming relentless, plodding, and overwhelming.

We've read books like this before. For example, there was With Love, From Planet B by Zaayin Salaam, MD, another dream-like book that took us to a world full of cults and aquatic creatures with seemingly no end in sight.

Anyway... with all that said, Childhood's Hour: The Lost Desert is a surrealist science-fiction/fantasy novel by E.E. Glass. You could also argue that the scale and stakes of this book qualify it as an epic.

On a blue-sand desert world ringed by six realms, reality is periodically shredded by High Noom, a cosmic surge tied to a murderous moon called the dark bride. We'd compare this to something like the Eclipse from Berserk.

Long ago a fanatic clergy fed children to a false god, Themon, until a lone Nightpriest exposed the truth and returned with Themon’s severed head. Since then, the deserts fear pretenders, meaning false gods in the land and sky, and they revere duty over dogma.

Loste (the aforementioned main protagonist) is a traumatized outsider, a gwaeloo spat out of the Fray, a white, mind-shredding mist. He is the audience’s eyes and the center of a prophecy thread called Eliyon. Nadhez is a desert native, a Buhangen and Kloonie mix, with emerald healing elan and a raptor totem named Chihiti. He is the rescuer, guide, and moral heart. Mara is a leader and healer aligned with rose energy who rides the sauren Uris and runs incubation domes. She is calm under fire and decisive in crisis. Kushtakka is a silver-furred city champion who fights like a force of nature and is quietly driven by love for his ailing wife Halona and fragile daughter Kaya. Nijal is a battlefield controller, a mancy prodigy who nets monsters with disc-borne tethers and fells them with precision horn bursts. Ataros is Loste’s elder and grandfather figure, the last link to his past and the one trying to hand him a destiny he can live with. Chihiti is Nadhez’s luminous raptor totem and the embodiment of protective love, and her fate is the book’s sharpest emotional knife. Armastoya is a vast corrupted land-heart of mouths and rot, a modern pretender like Themon. The rimari are guardians of each desert, Azure, Gold, Titian, Emerald, Rose, and Crimson, who argue whether to endure or resist the cycles of noom.

We only know this because we reread this multiple times and tried to write all these characters down. It's A LOT to keep track of!

WARNING: POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD! SKIP AHEAD TO AVOID.
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Loste staggers out of the Fray into a world of blue glass sand and living light. Nadhez saves him, recalls Chihiti into a totem, and teaches him how to survive. By the fire, Nadhez recounts the Nightpriest and Themon history that explains why this world distrusts gods and prizes duty. Trust builds, awkwardly and honestly.

Next the world widens. We zoom out to the rimari council on a crystal summit. Satha-nure of Azure urges action against the encroaching Fray and the coming High Noom while others say to endure. The map of six deserts clicks into place, and the word Eliyon starts trailing Loste like static, destiny knocking but not yet answered.

Then Armastoya and the poison strike. On the march to the capital, Loste and Nadhez blunder into Armastoya. In a feral, maternal blitz, Chihiti attacks to free Nadhez. They break loose, but Nadhez is poisoned with muki, not just a toxin but spiritual rot. He forces emerald light through Loste to purge trauma sludge and orders a desperate plan. He will enter tordir, a deep-healing sleep, while Loste drags him to the city, alone and in secret, because outsiders on sacred ground get killed.

The clock starts with High Noom. A violet comet, the dark bride’s child, slams near Vaylan’s Fountain, a mancy nexus outside the capital. The sky goes purple and the city mobilizes. Nijal nets and detonates dune leviathans, Kushtakka tears through whatever moves, and Mara rides out, drawn by reports and by Chihiti, who is flickering as the link to Nadhez stretches past breaking.

The gauntlet to the fountain follows. Half broken, Loste drags Nadhez toward the fountain while noom warps reality. A noombeast hunts Loste, he channels crimson energy into a glass dagger, and he kills it from within. As it dies, it rasps a single word, Eliyon. Loste collapses, bleeding out. With noom guttering, help arrives exactly once. Mara, Kushtakka, and Nijal converge as Nadhez kindles viridian fire to keep Loste’s heart moving.

Then comes rose plus emerald, the heartbeat scene. Emerald alone cannot stabilize a gwaeloo, so Nadhez asks Mara to braid rose with emerald, an intimate cross-spectrum healing that is considered taboo. They do it anyway, and it works. This is the book’s soul, survival powered not by purity or law but by connection and choice.

Chihiti dissolves into stardust after going too far from Nadhez or spending too much of herself, love with teeth and a price. Nadhez, still poisoned, performs a once-in-a-lifetime feat by raising a crystal mountain to contain the muki, buying the city time. Ataros brings Loste to a final star-bright lesson, his last push to pass the mantle and make the boy see what this gift really is.

The book lands with the city having withstood a night of noom and a comet-born incursion. Loste lives, barely, marked by the noombeast’s dying word and by the braid that saved him. Nadhez chooses to stay, ending his pattern of running. Mara stands beside both, now fully part of the same unit. Kushtakka returns to the walls because families like Halona and Kaya need tomorrow to exist. The prophecy thread, Eliyon, is no longer rumor, it is active. The war against pretenders in sky, soil, and story is far from over, but the team is real now.

The book seems to explore several themes, one of them being the dangers of cults. False gods versus true duty shows Themon and Armastoya as parasites wearing divinity, and the answer is costly courage and care. Trauma and cleansing, called muki, frames poison as both physical and narrative, rot from guilt, memory, and lies, and the antidotes are purges, braids, and bonds. Choice over fate insists that Eliyon might be destiny, but the story values choices, such as Nadhez saying I will stay, Mara attempting a taboo braid, and Loste refusing to die quiet. Found family under fire says survival is not solitary, it is people braiding strengths across rules and borders.

It can feel confusing because the story splices intimate survival with myth lore and council politics, drops invented terms without a glossary, and pivots points of view as the stakes widen. Read it as a straight line from Fray to Rescue to Armastoya and Poison to Comet and Noom to Fountain and Braid to Aftermath and Hand off to Destiny, and the shape becomes clear.

The short version is that a broken outsider named Loste is saved by a desert healer named Nadhez in a world that once worshiped a child-eating false god. As a comet and the moon’s wrath rip the desert open, a corrupted land-heart poisons Nadhez, a totem raptor gives everything, and the city’s champions, Mara, Kushtakka, and Nijal, ride to meet the storm. At Vaylan’s Fountain, rose plus emerald are braided to keep Loste alive. The night ends. The team stands. Eliyon is not a whisper anymore. It is the road ahead.

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SPOILERS END
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Ok, we have a few issues. First, did you notice how DENSE and convoluted that plot is? Well, you could argue that another word for dense is layered, another word for convoluted is intricate.

It's a rule of thumb to have only three or so characters per scene. It often seems like there are ten. The economy of language is also a thing. Speaking of which...

You have to read the book to get what we're saying about the details. On one hand, you could argue that it's eloquent. On the other hand, you could also argue that it's fluffy and flowery.
Do you know like when an ultra-tenured university professor is giving you a lecture about quantum entanglement (or, perhaps more fittingly for this novel, marine biology) and you nod along because the words are pretty, but it's in one ear and out the other.

There must be over a hundred different descriptions of sea creatures/aquatic-adjacent creatures. It was great the first twenty or so times, then it started seeming excessive, cloying, and perhaps even repetitive. We could've sworn there were like a dozen of similar-sounding descriptions of jellyfish swimming by.

Then came waves of kelp analogies draped over dunes, stingray shadows skimming the sand, octopus or squid arms curling around everything in reach, starfish and sea urchin spines glittering in the “tide” of noom, barnacle crusts on armor, coral cathedral walls, nautilus spiral motifs etched into every relic, eel and moray metaphors for every slithering threat, manta-wide “wings” blotting the sky, swordfish silhouettes that immediately get eaten by something larger, and the recurring horseshoe-crab carapace comparison for anything even vaguely domed. Add schools of glassfish-like lights, planktony bioluminescence across half the set pieces, and whole “reef” passages transplanted into the desert again and again, and the aquatic palette stops feeling rich and starts feeling like copy-paste with new adjectives.

How many more times do we need to read about octopuses, clams, crabs, and horshoe crabs (isopods)? Is describing the swordfish that was eaten going to advance the plot? It often just seems meandering.

But just when we were about to fall asleep because this book reads like how a bunch of ocean-themed relaxation/ASMR videos sound, we had SOMETHING HAPPEN!

Characters were being tied to stakes, faces painted, limbs bound in painful angles, silk veils fluttering while handlers chanted to a sky bride. Torches flared, a bridesmaid screamed, and ash rode the wind. The crowd spit on the charred remains in a warped gesture of devotion, and the scene finally snapped the story back to consequence...

...before describing more sea creatures and aquatic stuff until we got to more action/battle scenes, at which point we were checked out.

This book may be for you if you like surrealist, dream-like literature. Or it could be for you if you really like books with heavy emphasis on world-building.

This book is not yet publicly available. Stay tuned.