This was my first ARC ever and I LOVED it 💜

💜 This is in a lot of ways a story about grief. I lost my mom a couple of years ago so stories about this topic always hit a cord with me. At least if they're well written. Sometimes stories feel like they're written by someone who hasn't looked down the chasm that loss is, not really. Or maybe it just feels different to them and that's why I can't relate to any of it. G.B. Bancroft really finds the language of loss in this book. She captures what it feels like to have to move on after your world has been altered in this way. When you have to get back up when you're not actually sure you even can.

🥹 The prose in this book is just beautiful. The sadness, the love, the desire. It just sucked me in all the way. I can't wait to get a paper version of this one so I can get annotating. I felt seen and heard by these words in a way I don't easily. I love how Alice thinks in colour and in mixing colours and in textures and paint. It brings the world to life through her eyes and it just adds a whole other level of beauty to it.

🔥 IT'S ALSO JUST HOT YOU GUYS OMG. I'm crushing on 🐰 like there's no tomorrow and I CANNOT WAIT to see how the storyline between him and 🐉 develops. I just love all of them and all of them together and bisexuality is amazing and why choose is just the best thing ever. It made my own queerness blossom and feel all warm and fuzzy to read all about all of them.

✨ I love this book as a character study and as a romance but I love it a little less as a fantasy. The fantasy storyline is a little less flushed out and blooms a little less colourful than the rest of the work to me. Mind you: this is part one of a duology and we learn at the end that the fantasy element will get stronger in book 2, so maybe it balances out. For now, however, I wouldn't recommend it if you're really into (high) fantasy. I liked the fantastical elements and I'm curious where they'll go, but they felt less matured to me than the other elements. I also love this take on a classic we all know and I'm curious to see which other bits of that classic we'll see in book 2.

Overall, I adored this. Finished it over a weekend, forgot to eat, swooned (not because of the not eating), cried, got all kinds of turned on, learned about myself and had an amazing time. I recommend especially recommend if you're also a bi baby that feels lost in it all sometimes. Lovelovelove 💜✨