A brilliant collection of ideas, executed beautifully, at once full of comforting tropes and familiarities and surprising twists and brutal raw emotion.

At first the writing felt a bit... a little bit like "a tiktok book" or webnovel/fan-fic, not quite in a bad way, but in a way that felt slightly....boring and off? For example, I've never read a fantasy book that used words like "allosexual" and "enby", let alone use them without explanation of the terms. Not that this is a bad thing at all! I realised as the book continued that it had dropped more flowery prose and detailed fantasy worldbuilding in favour of instead fleshing out such a raw, visceral, REAL character, and a scarily fantastic depiction of generational trauma. As a stand-alone story, it made the right choice. Occasionally, brutally delivered lines about the raw truth of disability and otherness made me want to weep. I felt so...seen and understood in the way that the MC does not understand society or humanity or herself.

The first 2/3rds of the book felt maybe a little tropey and predictable- but in a comforting, familar way not bad. Then the last third tore this illusion away, and showed that happily ever after is not only unrelatistic, but that when it comes to monsters and trauma, theres an even better way forward.

Gonna be thinking about this one for a while, and recommending it to all my friends.