When I was thinking about writing this all day, each time I heard in my mind that Martina McBride song, "This One's for the Girls." No shit. This book is for the girls who have been rebuffed, mocked, spurned, cast aside, and deemed "too much" as a result of their hunger, their desire, their drive. I see you, I hear you, we are legion.

Our three female main characters are extremely distinct, but they have things in common - they are not seen. They are not known, or understood, or cared for. They have tasks and responsibilities saddled upon them. And while they labor to live up to those expectations (which I think many women would find pretty relatable), they privately want more and different things for themselves, with varied levels of self-disclosure and honesty. Treila, perhaps, is a bit different from Phosyne and Ser Voyne, in that while they really are subjugating their own desires and needs for the will of the king and the responsibilities he has laid at their feet, Treila is very focused on herself and her goals (and not in a bad way). Over the course of the novel, each woman becomes more honest with herself and with the others, but also, by the end, they have all had their consciousnesses altered, the trajectory of their thoughts changed. Treila becomes more relational, Phosyne more organized and confident, less pure chaos, and Ser Voyne... Ser Voyne learns how to make the brave choice to protect others because it's what she wants to do, what her values dictate she do, not what a man has told her she must.

The Starving Saints is a deeply weird, sumptuous, sapphic fever dream of a medieval lesbian cannibalism fantasy-horror, with so many threads for readers to examine and consider, while also trying to figure out what the fuck is going on here?

Truly this book drove me to consider religion, faith - and how it can be used against us, and doubt; responsibility and sacrifice, and the state of having responsibility thrust upon you rather than taking it yourself, as we see Ser Voyne do at the end, for the first time, getting her agency back. It made me think, of course, of nourishment, hunger, and desire - for intimacy, for food, for recognition, for revenge, for belonging. I even recognized some of the information I had been learning about in my non-fiction ADHD books, specifically "divergent thinking" in Phosyne's creative processes - while everyone else was zigging, she was zagging.

Seeing and thinking clearly versus being under the influence not necessarily of substances, but of poisonous, traitorous, insidious people and movements with agendas we cannot even parse. Ownership and possession, the subverting of hospitality in the event of allowing yourself to be saved, in effect to be saved by someone else as a way of ceding yourself to them and their influence. This book and these women made me think about the danger of seeing what we want to see and the underhyped benefits of making deals with the devil when our backs are against the wall to get what's ours, damnit, just so long as we negotiate well.

The ending, upon reflection, was perhaps just a little too easy, which knocked off the half a point. While I do and did think they should be able to walk out the front door, as perhaps they had been able to do for weeks, if only they had seen clearly, I also think potentially there should have been a bigger cost after what all they went through.

This line from the Acknowledgments at the end of the book did help me to fully enjoy the ending, however - "And Caitlin--you were right, Ser Voyne does have two hands."