I went into this book totally blind and ended up weirdly attached to this girl and her strange, stripped-down world. The writing isn’t flowery at all, but that almost made the emotional parts hit harder for me. I kept noticing how different she was from the other women, not in an exaggerated way, just in the small habits and reactions that only make sense when you realise she never had a real life before the bunker. Watching her try to build some sort of identity out of basically nothing made the whole thing feel tense and sad at the same time.

I liked how she moved through the world with this combination of curiosity and stubbornness, like she was teaching herself how to exist. Each new thing she figured out felt important, even when it was tiny. And when the loneliness started getting to her, it didn’t feel dramatic, just a slow shift that made sense for someone who never had a place in anything.

The ending shredded me to pieces. The only critiques i would have upon this book, is how much some of the women associate the idea of living and happiness with men. Though, i guess that can be expected as every human has different emotions and being held captive for so many years without touch or affection leads to such conclusions.

Even though it was written over 70 years ago, it’s still very relevant today as we’re told what to say, how to be, and how to think. We’re all expected to perform the same approved version of "normal". Yet, somehow, miraculously, stubbornly, we still cling to our messy, inconvenient, gloriously unapproved selves.

This one reads like someone narrating their day while standing in filth, pointing at things and naming them without flinching. Everything is delivered flat, like the book is shrugging its way through every awful detail. It’s short enough to inhale in one go, which somehow makes the whole experience worse, because there’s no break from the constant parade of grime and body-horror thoughts. The narrator feels like a deranged internet relic, drifting through scenes that don’t even pretend to make sense, just existing to remind you he is dangerous and disgusting and proud of it. Random horrors show up for a paragraph and then vanish, and the book doesn’t bother to explain any of it.

Weirdly, that’s what made it interesting. The story keeps choosing the nastiest route possible, like the author decided to test how long a reader can sit with someone this foul without looking away. I can respect that level of commitment. The last few pages pushed it far enough that my stomach actually flipped, which, honestly, feels like the point.

This book was just straight-up vile from start to finish, it was actively trying to test my limits for no real reason. I kept turning the pages only because something in me wanted to see how much worse it could get, and somehow it always found a way. The heavy focus on bestiality and the way it’s described completely shut me down. It stopped feeling like a story and turned into a long attempt to make me recoil over and over again. At a certain point i wasn’t even reading the plot anymore, just slogging through the shock factor. I can’t picture myself ever picking this up again, and i wouldn’t recommend it to anyone either.