Truly one of the all-time great modern queer romances. It's true that this book is full of lesbian yearning, but it's also incredibly hopeful in its ending which is rare for a book like this. It's a story of gender envy, the power of owning your own identity and narrative, and embracing the sexual aspects of your sexuality.

It's also incredibly hot, written in a pragmatic and delicate way that only a queer person could have written. It's a beautiful meditation on butch identity and the way that good sex and good queer friends can provide gender euphoria. It's so tactile I could feel the heat steaming off the grass and the satin of Mrs. S's skin. Truly beautiful literary fiction.

There are a lot of reviews talking about 'nothing happens' or its 'slow', but tbh I think that's a true skill issue. There is so much to dissect in this book and so much being said in every sentence. The tension is so rich and thick it's delicious.

With so much respect to V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke, it’s bluntly obvious thriller/mystery is not their usual genre to write in. It felt like their focus when writing this book was on the commentary around the publishing industry and its hardships, which I do think was important here, but the mystery aspect was left to the side when this was supposed to be, in fact, a mystery book.

The premise is interesting and the book has a nice introduction that makes you want to feel invested in the mystery and who’s going to come out victorious in the end, but so much happens in the meantime that deviates from what was the initial plot and it just gets messy. The plot is not cohesive, it has no structure and it doesn’t feel like it has a purpose. There were a lot of moments that I would hope something would happen and when it did… it brought nothing to the story. Sure, a lot of it gets explained at the end, but it doesn’t have any actual impact or reason in the moment.

The characters were such a waste and so much more could’ve been done with them. We learn so much about them, with some having such interesting backgrounds and important reasons to want to win this competition, but again none of it is actually impactful. So much time is wasted on insignificant details, so many chapters in povs of useless (and infuriating) characters, not to mention the amount of plot points that I thought were going to come up later in the book and change the trajectory of the plot but that were just forgotten and never picked up again.

All of this for an ending that isn’t even satisfactory but instead predictable and dull.