Instruct: Classify a given Amazon review as either positive or negative.
Query: impressive prose, but no connection

The writer is talented, certainly, and her prose is amazing. She is perceptive, and has wonderful descriptive passages and insights. However, there was something missing -- something big and necessary. I could not bring myself to really care and be in any way emotionally invested in any of the characters. There was so much darkness, sadness, tragedy, and just plain ugliness in the novel, with not enough beauty and redemption to make it worth struggling through all the darkness. If you're going to drag me through all this nastiness, loss, and depravity, you've got to give me something more to hold onto than these characters.