This book was excruciating to get through. The author wants to be Becky Chambers so bad, but instead fails abysmally, producing a book that was as confused in its own moral as it was confusing to pick apart.

The writing itself was clunky (every page, someone is "grinning". Just say smile. Please just say smile), and there were more than a few spelling/grammar mistakes, but I can excuse that in a self-published work. 

However, the characters are just unlikeable. They live on Mars, a society that contrasts Earth's dystopian capitalistic hell with a seemingly utopian social paradise. They seem to have everything a leftist could ask for (I say this as a leftist) - free accessible healthcare, universal basic income, wide and far-reaching social support systems, legal bans on what and where you can advertise, sustainability in the materials used to build and source their homes/tools/clothes, and so much more; why are they all so abysmal at being people? One is friends with extremists that

attempt to murder someone later in the book

. Another spends most of the book dehumanizing a colleague that's coded autistic while committing what's considered borderline emotional abuse in this society: "bridging". The character that's coded autistic (or mentally ill in general - she has an "abnormal disposition", something that manifests as a lack of empathy, an aversion to social cues, and her brain not responding to human interaction as a reward) spends most of the book trying to convince other people that she's a human that's worthy of support in the way she interacts with the world. I wish I was kidding - it took someone until chapter 30 to empathise with the autistic-coded character enough to finally see her as human enough to be properly friends with, after blowing up at her for advovating for her condition in the workplace. Surely, a social utopia with adequate healthcare would educate its citizens on dispositional normativity?

The other character that's coded to be mentally ill, San (who has a form of PTSD and displays some anxiety symptoms) at first refuses to get someone life saving help because the PTSD makes them see him as an enemy; then is seen grappling with what's effectively PTSD-informed xenophobia about this other character that's from Earth. And the whole time, other characters ignore this very real issue and invite the Earthling to start a business with them. Sure, they ask San, but it's heavily implied that San only agrees to this because they're using it as some form of unregulated exposure therapy. And it works, but a part of me wonders what they would have done if it hadn't. Diego deserves better friends, honestly. Ones that ask him how HE is from time to time, actually, now that I think about it.

This treatment of both San and Dhapree (Dhapree being the autistic-coded character) by the plot and the other characters paints the two of them as the irrational ones. The book seems at times preachy, and at other times completely amoral, and I feel like the author should have just picked one. Everyone either talks in therapy speak, or blows up at each other in irrational fights. No inbetween. This is like the "are you in the right headspace to receive information that could possibly hurt you" joke from twitter, in book form. Are these characters supposed to be the paragon of communicating like mature adults, or a group of irrational morally gray friends trying to start a business together and running into social and emotional challenges? Pick one, Haché, please. Because they spend so long arguing and misunderstanding each other and calling each other's dispositions "inhuman", there's maybe only the last 100 pages for any character growth to happen in. It happens, but it's incredibly rushed. I refuse to accept that a huge, century-long systemic conflict that people are on different sides of can be solved neatly (in the minds of those people) so that they all get along now, in a mere 100 pages. And, in a case of "tell, not show", of course the book says that these issues are complicated and they don't 100% get along, but it shows that everything is dandy and that they do.

The worldbuilding was so dense that it was impossible to convey it to the reader without "telling" rather than "showing" - the author could have simplified it for better narrative flow, but instead he stuck through it and the result is overwhelmingly dry at times. I could care about narrotology or Martian politics in the hands of the right character, but, as outlined above, they don't seem to want us to care. When a large part of the book is either people explaining things to other people as a form of exposition (mostly the Martians to the Earthling, or the narrotologist to her colleagues), or just pure exposition from the point of view of one of the characters, the whole text can take a lot to get through.

I rarely encounter a book I don't want to recommend to anyone. But there are so many books that execute each of the tropes presented in A Slice of Mars better and with much more fluency: for coworkers being shoved into weird and fun emotionally charged situations and growing to love each other, see "The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet" by Becky Chambers or "The Animators" by Kayla Rae Whitaker; for a social utopia that works, see the "Monk and Robot" duology by Becky Chambers or "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin; for food-based antics, see "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" by Douglas Adams or "Legends & Lattes" by Travis Baldree; and for ways a dystopia and a utopia clash or social upheaval is caused to make one into another, see "Pet" by Akwaeke Emezi (and its prequel, "Bitter"), or "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley, or "An Unkindness of Ghosts" by Rivers Solomon.

That's how much I hated this book. I'm recommending you others to cleanse your palate.