short version: i loved this and want it tattooed on my brain.

long version: max is relatable, hilarious, and precisely the kind of voice i wanna read in a largely plotless book. i could've easily spent another 100 pages in her head. vincent is, in my opinion, just as compelling a character as max, and the alternation of his past POV with max's present creates some delicious tension throughout. everyone is flawed and varying degrees of messy — max, vincent, their friends and families. they feel like real people you might know, with real quirks and habits.

i think dinan does an amazing job of handling her themes. marginalised identities, family, friendships and relationships, forgiveness and second chances. as you'd expect from the title, every person in max's lifes fucks up one way or another. every time, max is faced with a new side of someone she knows, and there's a constant reckoning she goes through as the new information clashes with the old. as she says, "no person is fewer than two things," including herself, and so when the picture of a person changes, the pieces of the relationship have to shift with it. we go through questions of who deserves forgiveness and who is entitled to forgive, and i thinnk the conclusion the book reaches re: all of that feels organic. might not be an immediately satisfying conclusion, but definitely satisfying-upon-reflection.

as a story about memory & storytelling, i loved this! as feminist anti-imperialist fantasy fiction, it's a little underwhelming.

also, nghi vo's prose is very pretty.

i told my mom that i enjoyed reading this and she said i need to either start or stop doing hard drugs.