Thank you NetGalley for the eARC

Y'all. It took me 5 months to finish this book 😅 I started in in April, just before I had a really busy month, and decided to put it aside because it was difficult to concentrate on it. Then later in May I read until the 60% mark, at which point a really gruesome scene happens, and I decided to put the book down until I felt like I was in a good spot mentally to actually finish this. And I guess it took me 4 months to get to that spot 😅

So. I did obviously struggle with this. This is my first time reading this author, though I usually love books with trans main characters. But this book is definitely too gruesome for me, and it felt really hopeless for the first 70%. The actual writing style is pretty engaging though, which was why I didn't want to DNF it even when I was struggling with it.

That said,the reason I'm giving 3 stars is just because I don't actually feel like Miles DID anything in this book. Everything happens TO him, he doesn't really get to make any choices himself. 

The first character Miles kills dies by accident, then the next character Miles almost decides not to kill, but then Cooper kills him. The 3rd character Miles just, again, ACCIDENTALLY kills, and the 4th character gets killed by Miles's dog and grandfather. Like I dunno, narratively it'd have been better if they'd actually decided to kill one of those characters.

  It also just kind of brushes past any decisions Noah and Cooper make - just a "oh they only did those horrible things because they were also victims of circumstance. Like, I just don't think I agree with that.

The first 50% of this book is also just very slow and there's a lot packed into the last 40% that could have used some breathing space between each scene.