Personal Enjoyment: 2/6 Writing Quality: 4.5/6 Final Rating: 2.25⭐️ (Rounded down to 2 for Pagebound)

Let’s get into the meat and potatoes here: this is an incredibly fatphobic book placed in a tasteless fantastical recreation of an immensely traumatic time period for Canada’s indigenous peoples. The Sixties Scoop is still in living memory. This isn’t an old historical wound that one can revisit without expectation of trauma. This is an event that is still being fought over in the court systems. Many of the people affected are still trying to make connections and find information about their lives before they were kidnapped by the Canadian government. You HAVE to handle a topic like this with care and with direct and honest commentary. None of that was done here.

One of the most insulting choices was to turn the children into “unwanted monsters” (including the literal antichrist). The comparison is horrendous. In fact, I would say it is so horrendous that it makes any attempts the author made to make positive social commentary null and void (especially given how minuscule and irrelevant some of those attempts were). The author can say that he reimagined it in a fantastical way because he didn’t think he had the voice needed to write about the Sixties Scoop, but giving it a fantasy skin doesn’t actually change what you are talking about. You don’t magically create distance by taking away reality. You just make your own internal thoughts incredibly obvious.

The second choice to have this book be from the POV of the social worker is wild. It’s literally abuse from the abuser’s eyes. It doesn’t matter that Linus “learns his lesson” and grows to care for the children. He is still functionally a part of the abusive system that kidnaps “unwanted” children. His moment of growth doesn’t negate the fact that he spent YEARS as an unthinking cog in this machine. It shouldn’t have taken a crush to realize he is the villain. The fact that it did take that proves that this man is short-sighted and naive with zero care for the children he professes to protect.

The final nail in the coffin for me is that all of this is just backdrop for a romance. This simply isn’t a book about the Sixties Scoop. This is a romance set on the stage of a fantasy-washed historical tragedy. It’s a book that drowns in its own savior complex in order to make the romance between its two main men palatable. Tasteless. Absolutely tasteless.

On top of all of these issues surrounding the book’s inspiration is the fact that the entire text is riddled with fatphobia. The jokes were unnecessary and yet were completely unavoidable throughout. Linus is constantly made into a joke because of his weight. This “joke” is made by nearly every character, but the children are particularly relentless about it. It made much of the character interaction feel terrible.

The writing from a grammatical and structural standpoint was fine. It’s biggest crime is that it lagged in many place. It also felt a touch repetitive at times. That being said, I didn’t notice any true grammatical errors (though I was on audiobook) and the issues with the plot were relatively minor.

I’m not going to read the sequel. This book put such a bad taste in my mouth and I have absolutely zero desire to know what else he could’ve done with this poor fantasy mockup of a cultural genocide. I don’t know that I will read any other of this author’s works either. I don’t trust him to handle sensitive topics with the care they deserve, and looking over his bibliography makes me think that much of his work centers around said topics.