So on the nose, it was profound. An absolute confection of a story dripping with cunning, indignation, and yearning. I was impressed with the cleverness of it all--yes it smacked you in the face with symbolism, but isn't that kind of the point? This book does not pretend to be subtle. These girls will get their comeuppance, but how will it happen, and how will you feel about it in the end? Perhaps not as straightforward as it once seemed.

Marie and Sadie were addictive, in the way sweets can be, and you're left with a toothache that you keep tonguing. Every time you press, that little shock of pain is a masochistic kick to wake up your brain.

In this book, so many women woke up, and oh, it was delicious.

A literary thriller that’s a heavy hitter for both genres. On the surface, this book is presented as an entanglement between 2 ambitious, wronged Asian American women. You think you’re about to set out on a classic feminine rage, revenge story. And that’s there—the plot delivers on all the twisty, anxiety and paranoia inducing reveals of a stellar thriller, but what really made this a 5 star read for me was how it approached the emotional and interior.

Both women are layered, fully realized, flawed. The story brings a magnifying glass to our modern moment. We start with a probe into online mob mentality, asked to consider who society protects and reviles. We go on to explore sharp-tongued questions of performative liberalism, the narrative of American exceptionalism, what constitutes power in a surveillance state and who is capable of wielding it. In the periphery, karma, jinn, and ghosts push for dominance. The villains are not villains, and we have no heroes. All we have is the messy middle, the gray, and the ink bleeding off the page.