This is one of those books that doesn’t just tell a story — it breathes it. Reading it feels less like moving from page to page and more like drifting, like being carried across water by language that knows exactly where it’s going, even when you don’t.

The writing is the heart of this novel. It is mesmerising, poetic, and deeply intentional in a way that feels rare. The prose moves effortlessly between registers: at times it reads like an academic paper, precise and observational; at others like a folktale passed down by firelight, mythic and intimate; and then suddenly, achingly human, slipping into first-person voices that feel like confessions. These shifts never feel gimmicky. Instead, they mirror the way memory, history, and storytelling actually work — layered, fragmented, communal. The structure itself becomes meaning.

What struck me most is how confident the writing is. It trusts the reader to sit with ambiguity, to pause, to breathe, to remember. It allows silence and slowness. It invites you to stay. There is a hypnotic quality to following the story this way, as perspectives rotate and overlap, as we sometimes observe from the outside and sometimes find ourselves uncomfortably inside the story, implicated simply by reading. It is a deeply unique approach to fantasy — not driven by spectacle, but by voice, by rhythm, by interiority.

Thematically, this book is an exploration of found family, sisterhood, loneliness, and the quiet devastation — and beauty — of letting go. It asks what it means to belong, who gets to decide that belonging, and what it costs to love when love does not guarantee permanence. Relationships are not framed as possessions, but as moments of choosing: choosing to stay, choosing to leave, choosing to remember. There is a tenderness to the way connection is handled, paired with an understanding that love does not always mean proximity, and that sometimes the deepest acts of care involve release.

The worldbuilding unfolds gently, almost sideways. Rather than overwhelming the reader, it reveals itself through myth, memory, and lived experience. Characters feel less like constructs and more like echoes — people shaped by place, by community, by fear and hope and longing. They linger long after the page is turned, not because of grand gestures, but because of the emotional truth they carry.

This is not a book you rush through. It’s one you live inside for a while, one that asks you to slow down and feel — grief, wonder, connection, ache. It’s a story about stories, about the way we hold onto each other, and about what remains when we cannot. By the time it ends, it feels like you’ve spent a lifetime there.

And somehow, you’re grateful for every second.