Incredibly dull despite all attempts to be otherwise.
1 star
The worst crime of this book is how exceptionally dull it is. It's taken so many topics and smashed them into one short novel, and it barely makes any sense or even tries to deal with anything.
The protagonist is aesthetically an anarchist, though most of their actions aren't characterised through any anarchic principles. They are characterised through the most common stereotypes of anarchist actions. They live in a squat (and the squat is stereotypically not taken care of, with the author at some point acting as if you should just mistreat a squat because it's monetarily free rather than do what you can to maintain it... which, from my conversations with people who've lived in squats? the latter is more common than just trashing it, especially as it helps to keep more attention off you... also it creates a realm of responsibility for the space, rather than just treating …
The worst crime of this book is how exceptionally dull it is. It's taken so many topics and smashed them into one short novel, and it barely makes any sense or even tries to deal with anything.
The protagonist is aesthetically an anarchist, though most of their actions aren't characterised through any anarchic principles. They are characterised through the most common stereotypes of anarchist actions. They live in a squat (and the squat is stereotypically not taken care of, with the author at some point acting as if you should just mistreat a squat because it's monetarily free rather than do what you can to maintain it... which, from my conversations with people who've lived in squats? the latter is more common than just trashing it, especially as it helps to keep more attention off you... also it creates a realm of responsibility for the space, rather than just treating it like a garbage heap you sleep in). The protagonist starts off the book getting beaten by a cop at a protest. There's a lot of protest imagery. There's not a lot of direct action imagery.
It's a very superficial depiction of an anarchist, and it maintains a stereotype that doesn't encompass many anarchic values.
The queerness the protagonist exhibits is also superficial, and it would be fine if it wasn't made into a focus of their personality. There's very little exploration around their gender beyond them spending a lot of the book getting upset about how their family deadnames them (which makes sense) or how other people "refuse to understand them" while they never explain themselves. The author takes great pains to tell us that they've done it a lot outside the text, but they never really do it in the text (beyond conversations like "Giselle?" "My name is Crow." "Giz-- I mean Crow"). The same thing is true of their apparent asexuality? Which is also presented as a simultaneous internal desire for sex but an external disgust for? So all of this comes off very weird.
Like, I don't need the character to be constantly rummaging around in their brain for a conversation about being queer or how they knew or whatever, but there needs to be something if you're going to make those conversations a very key part of a person while never actually dealing with it. A character can just be queer, that's fine. The author wanted this character wanted to just be queer while also trying to explore queerness.
And the shamanism as a solution to understanding abuse? Just. I can't. This book is tragic about appropriation and handling discussions of abuse... It all just feels so incomplete, unexplored... Confused? Just... incoherent.