Easily one of the best books I have ever read & I immediately added it to ones that I needed to own for my personal library. I know this is one I will come back to again & again. It was so enthralling that I read it in its entirety while out on a walk (which was quite fitting - if you know you know).

The main character is quite autistic coded & I found that I identified with her immensely. The ways in which growing up without a sense of societal connection & a stifled sense of community leads to someone not understanding nor being able to perform typical social norms echoes the autistic experience whether it had been the intent or not. The book questions what makes someone a human - is connection with others & integration into a community necessary for the full experience of humanity & without that are we much more than any other creature on the planet?

The book is simultaneously bleak yet hopeful. It fell directly into the wheelhouse of the types of speculative fiction that I enjoy & I came out of it with my mind full of questions about life, existence & humanity.

The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking.

I know this is a fairly vague review but I truly believe that this is a book that people should experience rather than hear about. Additionally, I cannot recommend enough the afterward by Sophie Mackintosh & the translator's note at the beginning.

Read for HRCYED 3.0 for the prompt Cover Styles - Illustrative without lineart.