I really want to say I loved this book, I certainly felt a massive connection to the characters and god I did love the storyline, but the pacing really fell short. I felt like nothing happened at a speed that made sense, the first hundred pages just felt like the story was going nowhere. The last hundred pages were probably paced the best, but the ending also fell short, I wanted a bit more, just something else to explain what was going on, it was the only time that i felt the story was moving too quickly. However, I think this story has such amazing representation, my heart melted at Silas and Daphne finding each other, and in Silas connecting with the gardener. The magic in this book was devastating, but i felt that it was so accurate to the story and the time period. This book definitely transported me into another time, and i definitely formed a connection with all of the girls in the story and I think their story was an important one to be told. This book covered an amazing bout of history and I'll definitely recommend it to other people because it has everything a story needs to be fallen in love with, it just didn’t hit the mark with me.

Thrilled to see trans rep. Unfortunately how contemporary and American the writing was made it quite difficult to suspend disbelief that this could be set in Victorian England.

Absolutely breathtaking, as in it will reach out and steal your breath away until you’re gasping and pleading for air.

This book is absolutely not for the faint of heart and there are some very severe triggers, but if you want to challenge the way you view gender and the horror genre this is an amazing book to do so with. Andrew Joseph White grabbed me with his first book and this book has me coming back for more and more and more. We absolutely need more representation like this of queer, genderqueer, and trans characters and authors and I will be recommending this book to all of my friends.

this book reads like a nightmare you can't stop thinking about, it follows you even when you're awake and doesn't give you a single moment of clarity. andrew joseph white's writing is so horrifyingly surreal, I can't believe his book(s) aren't being talked about more.

'the spirit bares its teeth' is full of themes that I don't see very often in the YA genre, specifically gore at this level, but everything works so well. from the trans and autistic rep to the historical aspects of the victorian era, AJW strings it all together in a way that would be immensely eye opening for a young adult. the representation throughout this book is extraordinary, I'm not trans or autistic but reading about characters who are and to see their point of view in such a raw way still taught me a lot about their experiences. when it comes to the gory aspects of this book, I loved it. I'm such a sucker for anything horror and gory in film, but it's hard to find a book that does it well on a page and AJW does it perfectly! I felt like I was watching everything happen in front of me (I won't go into detail, but just know that it can be a lot in a few scenes). I got the chills, I even teared up a few times and I had to put the book down for a few minutes to think "noooo way did I just read that"

ever since reading 'hell followed with us' I've been such a fan of AJW's writing and ability to take stories like these and refuse to sugarcoat a single thing about them. these stories are honest and brutally horrific, but that's what makes them GOOD and completely unforgettable.

*Thank you so much to NetGalley and Holiday House / Peachtree / Pixel+Ink / Peachtree Teen for sending me an ARC of this novel in exchange of an honest review!!*

A warning before anyone picks up this novel, there are plenty of trigger warnings: transphobia, ableism, physical assault, sexual assault (discussed and heavily implied), gore, surgical procedures (depicted and discussed), pregnancy and miscarriage discussed, etc. Keep these themes in mind before reading, and take Andrew Joseph White's advice to take a break when needed.

With that all said, this is one of the best novels I've read halfway into the year, hands down.

A brutal horror YA novel, Silas' story is not a pleasant one. He's an autistic trans boy in the 1880s being set up to being the perfect Speaker wife and having to deal with violet eyes he didn't want - violet eyes associated with mediums and the Veil. On top of that, he ends up getting sent to Braxton’s Sanitorium and Finishing School to treat "Veil's Madness", surrounded by other girls in need of "being cured". It certainly doesn't help when there ends up being the ghosts of missing students beg him for help, leading him into solving the mystery as to what happened to those missing girls. With unexpected allies at his side as well as a handful of foes to deal with, he faces many horrors along the way - much of them more real than we could imagine.

I enjoyed Hell Followed With Us, and it was the same case with The Spirit Bares Its Teeth. A protagonist we can root for and sympathize with, along with other complex characters to make up the supporting cast, we get the feelings of dread from the setting and plot points. In addition, we get a vivid image of the settings, the descriptions of the characters' appearance and the feelings the characters go through. Also, the story knows when to convey a sweet moment or two - if you know, you know.

Please pick up this novel when it comes out.

got this arc from netgalley, thanks!

all the content warnings. death, abusive parents, abusive teachers, gore, pregnancy, queerphobia, brainwashed pick me's but it's 1881, literally anything you can think of if it's traumatising you will find it here.

this book tries extremely hard to be a take on misogyny and eugenics. it kind of manages that. clunkily. it is extremely exhausting to have the endless bigotry thrown in your face, and unfortunately the book didn't manage to actually get its message across, because it was too busy forcing sexism and a teenager with weirdly modern sensibilities down my throat. i think this story could have been extremely compelling. but it was not. read on to learn why! (kind of poorly formatted list shape)

i really liked daphne! she was cool. loved her confidence and her belief in what was right and all that. good character give me more please.
the whole ghost system was pretty cool too except we spent so much time railing against the endless bigotry and oppression that it didn't get the time it should have. for shame.

i liked silas as a character, but i never understood his modern understandings and opinions. he was raised in an extremely sheltered (and abusive) environment where he was only exposed to colonial and imperialistic understandings of the world. while i did like that he already knew that all that was wrong at the beginning of the book, the way he phrased it all was so fucking modern it didn't make any sense at all. also, silas is ridiculous about corsets. i get why he personally doesn't like them for himself. that bit makes sense. BUT, a properly fitted corset does not move organs out of shape or deform the body or any of that nonsense and it is patriarchal myths that perpetuate that misunderstanding. this book, and silas, use corsetry as shorthand for the oppression of women and female-presenting people, which is lazy, inaccurate, and boring. do better. also, corsetry changed throughout the time it was used and saying it was meant to accentuate every curve or whatever is not accurate? it was also about smoothing and chest and back support and the silhouette changed dramatically throughout even just the last quarter of the 19th century.
there are actually lots of ways that this book pretends to be historical but just isn't (i am aware that this is a fantasy novel). it was so divorced from historical reality as to make putting it in england a waste of time. just make up a world! then you don't have to pretend to have done research! one thing that kept sticking out to me in this front is the lack of understanding about titles. if a man is viscount luckenbill, his last name is not also luckenbill. title and name are separate. it should be lord (first-name last-name), viscount luckenbill. supposedly this book takes place in 1881, and from my very short (and possibly incorrect) research, the first mention of the "husband stitch" was in 1885.
i don't know why we ever needed to learn silas' deadname, or possibly even daphne's. however, i am not trans so i am ready and willing to be wrong on that front. it just didn't feel to me like it added anything and it could have been easily written around.
it extremely pissed me off that george spoiler>was bad</spoiler>. it didn't serve a purpose other than to make silas even more alone in the world. story-wise, it wasn't helpful. it didn't move any thing along other than my disgust for this book.
i couldn't tell the girls at the school apart for most of it. sorry, i just couldn't. too many names, not enough personality traits. what's a girl (me) to do.
medical matters-wise. "running stitch" is definitely not the one to use on a body. prove to me you don't know anything about sewing or getting stitches without actually saying so. i looked it up, and continuous stitches are used on people. but i doubt they are the same as a running stitch, which is specific and not suited (as far as i can tell) to skin.
silas LOVES to explain his bisexuality by adding on bits and pieces about how he loves women different from how everyone else because he doesn't want to just control them. yawn. if this kid is so exposed to modern sensibilities how has he not met a single nice man before? like, good people weren't an invention of the twenty first century my dude.
silas basically fixated on daphne immediately and its just like... dude do you really need to fall in love with the first person who is nice to you? isn't that a little boring of you? especially since i don't get why they were so in love. it was great they had stuff in common and teamed up to fight the big bad! good for them! not a good basis for a relationship though, unfortunately. also i hate any character who is all like "i never saw the point of kissing but then you kissed me and now it's my favourite" jesus christ let people not want to kiss it isn't the end of the world.
can we stop making the teenagers pregnant. pretty please. also it extremely annoyed me when silas was like "oh she fell down a flight of stairs and put her arms around her belly so she must be pregnant" no she FELL DOWN A FLIGHT OF STAIRS SO HER BODY IS OUCHY SERIOUSLY but then she was pregnant so i was a) proved wrong and b) really fucking mad.

anyways. if you want blunt force trauma in the shape of a book go ahead but i would not recommend

A huge thank you to NetGalley and Holiday House/Peachtree/Pixel+Ink/Peachtree Teen for providing this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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Trigger Warnings:
- Transphobia
- Ableism
- Sexual assault
- Gore; medical gore; explicit mentions of performing a cesarean section and removing the uterus
- Pregnancy
- Miscarriage
- Violence

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“There’s a difference between weakness and survival.”

This book is a wonder. It’s bloody, and violent, and freeing. It lets you be yourself, guts and all, and doesn’t shy away from honesty and being true to oneself.

Our main character Silas (“Gloria”) is trapped by convention to be nothing more than a wife to produce (male) children. Despite his interest in anatomy and becoming a surgeon, and absolutely no interest in being a wife or a woman at all. However, when he tries to break away from the life forced on him, he’s caught and sent to a kind of finishing school to turn “women” like him into perfect wives - or else. This is a great setting for a gothic horror. Our main character is trapped, with no or very few allies, and must do whatever he can to save himself before it’s too late.

The society clearly takes its inspiration from the spiritualist movement of the early 1800s. (I personally just want to mention this because this era is so fascinating to me, and I almost love every novel I’ve read that takes direct inspiration from it.) I thought it was interesting that originally women were the ones doing the medium work, but once it was discovered how to use the power for war and money women were banned from doing it - or risk becoming ill. And this begs the question - is this “Veil-sickness” real, or is it manufactured to ensure compliance?

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I thought the worldbuilding for the setting was phenomenal - it’s not just simply info-dumping at us. Concepts that we learn more about as the novel progresses - the importance of the purple eye color, the existence of ghosts and mediums, the society controlling the use of contacting spirits - are casually brought up with the understanding that the person being talked to understands it already. Personally, I much prefer this type of worldbuilding, as I don’t like it when it gets to “anime-conversation” style, where I’m being explicitly explained concepts that, by all means, the character should already know. It’s much more natural to piece together the information we’re given, and to discover the whole picture more naturally.

We aren’t told until a conversation with his brother that our main character is even a trans man who secretly goes by the name Silas, which I thought was a nice change of pace to some books just Telling you. In the same way we’re told how the main character is autistic, simply by his reactions, his brother’s help, and how he reacts and thinks. It’s entirely naturally built into the character, and nothing feels manufactured.

The inner voice of the character - constantly mocking him, telling him to shut up, to behave, etc - being internally seen as a rabbit was an interesting choice. I felt it had a lot of symbolism, in the fact that we typically see rabbits as cute and nonthreatening, and yet the things it is saying to Silas are cruel. I thought it served as a nice mirror to the idea of their society “protecting” women (or anyone it deems to be women) by forcing them to be small and meek, and this being seen as a positive due to them being “the weaker sex.”

There’s also really well-done tension with the characters that Silas meets, where even when nothing is explicitly going wrong at that moment, you pick up on something being off. There were multiple characters that we met at the beginning who had some mildly reddish flags popping up for them, but otherwise were benign. But then, as the novel progressed, these issues became more pronounced until by the end you were almost expecting their heel-turn, but you were hoping the entire time you were wrong about it.

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This novel ties together a lot of concepts and ideas extremely well, kept me hooked until the last page and even wincing at times. I highly recommend this book.

The synopsis for this book sounded wildly intriguing to me, but in the end, I wish more the spiritualism aspect would have been explored with more nuance. There was a whole lot of telling and not a lot of showing which I think was a missed opportunity.

That was also a problem for me in the area of character development. While each of the many characters were distinctive, none were very fleshed out feeling. I went along because I knew who I was supposed to view as the goodies and badies, but
I didn't feel truly invested in anyone.

This was a very quick read, and, again, the idea of combining the supernatural realm of spirits with Victorian, patriarchal ideology was really cool. I just wish the end product felt less forced.

I did VERY MUCH appreciate the content warnings that the author included in the beginning of this book. It is very dark and gore-filled, and I appreciated knowing that going in.

I did DNF this book it was too slow for me I would pick it up and just put it down ten seconds later I don't know if it was because it was YA and I mostly read adult. The ideas were there but the pacing of the writing just did not keep me interested. I did find the characters a little service based.

I'm not sure if I devoured this book or if this book devoured me. This is a book that I want to read again and again. Despite the horror in this novel, it feels almost like a comfort read. I identified so much with Silas and his story was just so wonderfully done. I almost didn't want it to end. I love the world that Andrew Joseph White creates in this book. I was immediately sucked into the story and by the end of the first chapter I was already obsessed. The books is paced well and has you on the edge of your seat wondering what is going to happen next. Do yourself a favor and pick up this book.

Silas Bell is not what the world wanted. He's not the perfect violeteyed specimen, he's not the willing sacrifice for a Speaker marriage, he's not the "normal" well-mannered child his parents wished for, and he's certainly not the girl the whole world sees him as.

I give this book a 5/5 stars despite DISTINCTLY not enjoying it at points, since I recognize that my own biases colour my perception of the content. This book is UNCOMFORTABLE in a way that most horror books fail to be. Not only is there the horror of death, gore, violence against women, multiple phobias, non-consent, and torture, but there is also the horror of both being known and not being known at all. In a ghost story filled with hauntings, the spirits took a backseat as Silas Bell went through the most harrowing experiences.

I enjoyed the plot, characters, worldbuilding, and magic system, though I would definitely say the magic system was the most confusing by far of those four aspects. I think more time could have been given to the plot, but I wouldn't exchange the time we spent with Silas for it. The supporting cast was memorable and despite such a short time to establish so many young women, they all stand out for their own reasons. My favourite character by far was Daphne. I cried many times during this book, but one of the hardest cries was when she revealed the source of her name. I desperately want to read more historical fantasy with trans and autistic characters, a genre that desperately needs expanding.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me with the arc.

The review will contain slight spoilers, so proceed with care!

It has been a long time since I was this enamoured with a book. It fits the Gothic genre perfectly and still manages to weave a thread of hope throughout the story. This is a book I will definitely recommend to whoever wants to listen to my bookish rambles, but it’s not for the faint of heart!

The story is set in Victorian England, where by some mysterious event people are suddenly born with purple eyes giving them the ability to see ghosts. More interestingly, it seems like the Veil between the ghostly world and the ‘real’ world has thinned to almost nothing at some places. The people with violet eyes have to power to interact with the Veil and its ghostly inhabitants and it doesn’t take long until people try and harness this power for their own gain. Within Victorian England it is the Speaker Society that quickly takes over the reign over this power. Our main hero, Silas, is one of those violet eyed people, sucked into a world where the Speaker Society dictates the lives of those born with violet eyes. Where the men in power think they can dictate other’s lives and bodies for their own agenda.

The main hero of the story, Silas has stolen my heart. It doesn’t happen often that I’m completely amazed by a character, but Silas has quickly become one of my favourite characters. The strength, wit and kindness of him is everything. As does Daphne, who I admire so much. The characters are written marvellously and feel so real, that it feels like a representation of the people we may know and love in our very own lives.

The LGBTQ+ topics within the story are handled with such care, yet it doesn’t back away from the cruel reality many of our community have faced throughout history, a representation we desperately need within more literature. It shows the struggle of bodily autonomy, when society thinks it can take a claim on ones shape and mind. But also the struggle of the many for which the system isn’t made, and for those who cannot conform to the impossible norm that keeps being enforced.

All in all, I would definitely recommend this book to every Gothic lover out there! For those less used to the horror and gore of the genre, be aware, but if you can look past the blood and the guts, a heart wrenching and heartwarming story can be found at its very core.

Set in an alternate Victorian London where the veil between our world and the spirit world has thinned, and people with violet eyes have the ability to work spirit magic, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White follows the story of Silas. When the veil first thinned spirit work was considered suitable for women; until men realised that it gave them power. Now men are allowed by law to do spirit work, but women are prohibited and are used for breeding.

Silas is transgender, a boy born in a girl’s body, and with violet eyes he is destined to be married off to a wealthy man. The idea of being pregnant horrifies and terrifies Silas, and so he decides to do something risky. He dresses up as a boy and attends a Royal Speaker Society gala in the place of a young medium who couldn’t attend. Instead, Silas will receive the spirit-work seal meant for the real Mr. Roswell. With a seal he can escape his life, live as a man and train to become a doctor.

What Silas doesn’t take into account is the test that he has to complete to win his seal, and when things go very wrong he’s sent to Braxton’s Sanitorium and Finishing School. He’s “diagnosed” with Veil sickness, which he soon finds out is what all the residents at Braxton’s have been diagnosed with. They’re all girls who don’t fit within the Speaker’s perfect idea of what a wife should be, and they’re all there to be cured. When it becomes clear that not everything is as it seems, and that previous residents who were sent to Bethlem Royal Hospital never actually made it there, Silas starts to investigate further.

At first, he feels completely alone. The other residents are either unfriendly, concentrating on becoming cured or too terrified to draw attention to themselves. As Silas finds support and kinship from two unexpected sources, he begins to unravel the mystery of Braxton piece by horrific piece.

The Spirit Bares Its Teeth is a dark horror novel that unapologetically looks at how society treats people who are different. I’ve recently seen people discussing whether young adult books are becoming too dark, with the suggestion that they are being written for adult readers rather than young people. The Spirit Bares Its Teeth is a difficult novel to read, and that’s from my perspective as a queer disabled adult. But that is not to say that it’s unsuitable for young people, nor was it written with them in mind. Rather the opposite; this book is White saying “I see you” and that is something that many teenagers need to hear.

While the main character of The Spirit Bares Its Teeth is transgender and autistic, the addition of Veil Sickness means that this is a book that will resinate with a many readers. White conveys so many feelings of being different, of what it’s like to be viewed as useful/a commodity to non-disabled people/people in power when it suits them, and to be considered as wrong, “ill”, just because you’re different. The residents of Braxton are powerless apart, but together they are able to achieve much more and that is an important message in a young adult novel.

White provides content warnings at the beginning of the novel. I strongly recommend checking them before picking this one up because his descriptions are very graphic at times and in conjunction with the storyline it can be quite triggering (it was for me, at least). I say all this not to put people off reading, but to ensure everyone has a positive reading experience. I thoroughly enjoyed The Spirit Bares Its Teeth and I will definitely be checking out his other book, and any future titles.

Thank you, NetGalley, Andrew Joseph White, and Peach Tree Teen for sending me an E-ARC in exchange for an honest review! 🥰🫶
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Let me first say, I loved The Spirit Bares Its Teeth even more than Hell Followed With Us!!! I don’t typically read historical fiction so I wasn’t sure if I was going to love this one the way I did Hell Followed With Us, but wow was I wrong. 😅 This one is very gorey and grotesque so if that’s not your thing this one probably isn’t for you, but if you read and enjoyed Hell Followed With Us then I think you’ll like this one as well! Personally, I liked the gore and think it added to the novel’s atmosphere. Andrew has such a way at describing gore that it is so easy to imagine even if your eyes haven’t seen what’s being described. I really enjoyed it in HFWU and I think his writing has elevated even more in this second book. I think this was a very powerful novel and one I can definitely see myself coming back to. It shows how cruel the world can be to those who don’t fit societal standards and with some fight we can get our happy endings too! ☺️
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I also liked the fantastical elements of this story being violet-eyed humans who can communicate with spirits. I like how this fantasy is woven in so wonderfully into the realistic that it makes it seem like ‘oh yes of course violet-eyed humans’. I also like how this skill isn’t like a main focus of the story but at the same time, it is.
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[SPOILER] One of my absolute favorite things was the relationship between Silas and Daphne! 🥰 Daphne is such a sweetheart and Silas needs that! They even each other out in the best way and Daphne is Silas’ light in such a dark story. [SPOILER END]
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I also really enjoyed watching the relationships with the girls at the school and Silas develop. It was really interesting to see how the girls changed from when Silas first started at the school to the end of the novel. All of the girls at the school are cunning and ruthless in a means of survival and it's really fascinating to see the separate personalities play out. Also, the characters in the book can switch up so fast! There were characters at the beginning of the novel I thought I would love and ended up hating and vice versa!
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One last thing, can we please give a round of applause to the cover!!! 👏 I was wondering when that sliver of glass in Silas’ hand would come into play and goddess it certainly does! I can’t wait to see the fanart for this book! Also yes, I will be buying every edition of this fabulous book that I can! 10,000 stars out of 5!!! 😊🫶
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⚠️Please please please check the trigger warning before reading!⚠️
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👁️🐇The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White comes out on September 5th! 🐇👁️

4.5

Oh my God this book!!! it took me a while to get used to the story because there was a lot of new information and I was a bit confused about who was who, but once I got it, it was ADDICTIVE.

I knew I was going to be HORRIFIED when I started reading it, and it was as I expected. It was such a well written terrifying experience, and if you're thinking of reading it, definitely give it a chance.

After reading it, I feel strong enough to try and strangle my fucking rabbit.

Thank you to netgalley for the e-arc.

Andrew Joseph white’s first book quickly became one of my all time favourites so I had some high expectations for this one and it definitely did not disappoint. I loved this book, the characters, and the adventure! This is a must read and I can not wait to read more by this author!

4.5 stars.

Thank you so much to the Peachtree Teen and Netgalley for providing an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely fucking loved this. I don't even know how to fully articulate all that I'm feeling. I truly adored this book so much and I am eternally grateful that I got an arc of it. This story follows a young autistic trans boy named Silas, set in Victorian-era London. He attempts to escape his arranged marriage, but fails and ends up diagnosed with Veil sickness, which is said to cause madness in violet-eyed women. He is then sent to Braxton's Sanitorium and Finishing School, a facility whose objective is to cure the sickness and produce obedient Speaker wives. However, when things aren't as they seem and girls end up going missing one after the other, Silas is determined to get to the root of things and what he discovers is more horrifying than he could have ever imagined.

Silas is such a beautifully written main character. I loved him so much and getting to see the world from his point of view. It is so evident how much care and compassion was put into his character and his arc throughout the book. I truly loved his romance with Daphne and how they were both so caring and gentle with each other. It was so heartachingly precious and definitely a needed reprieve from the horrors of Braxton. I also really loved the friendships that Silas made both with the other students and another autistic character. I really liked that each of the students had such distinct personalities and ways of thinking. Even for the girls that I disagreed and got upset with, I truly understand why they acted the way they did and their reasonings.

I am not a big reader of horror, so I was initially very nervous to read this, which is funny considering I finished this in three days (and that was with me trying to take my time). I knew Silas's special interest was surgery and was expecting to have to put the book down more, but shockingly, the surgery talk was easy to get through, especially compared to the "therapy sessions". During those, I felt so sick to my stomach with dread and disgust. The horror aspect of the book was less gory than I was expecting and more viscerally sad and upsetting. ***PLEASE BE SURE TO CHECK THE TRIGGER WARNINGS!***

I loved the discussions surrounding transness and neurodivergence and how Silas cannot separate being trans from being autistic. I also loved that he got to have close relationship with people who shared in one of his identities and having a deep connection with them due to that. In addition, I really liked the discussions of masculinity, especially when we see the difference in how Silas views his masculinity compared to how another character views theirs. I appreciate Andrew Joseph White for showing the ways that marginalized people are harmed and taken advantage of by the patriarchy. He also shows how those who firmly hold onto these patriarchal values will do so, even if they also suffer the effects of it, directly or indirectly. Some will hold on for the illusion of safety and others for the desire for power.

This book was just completely amazing and I want to recommend it to anyone and everyone. This is the first of Andrew Joseph White's books that I've read and despite being a bit squeamish with horror, I'm looking forward to checking out more of his work.

Thank you netgalley for the arc!

PLEASE CHECK CONTENT WARNINGS!!

I’m extremely excited to give this my first five stars of year for novels! Everything about this book was phenomenal in the most gross and graphic way. Set in 1883 London, Silas is sent away to a finishing school for “veil sick” girls after trying to escape an arranged marriage. Not long after being there ghosts of missing students start asking him for his help.

I was worried at the beginning that I wasn’t going to be able to stomach the story, but it was written so beautifully it was worth it. Silas is trans and autistic, and how he was presented was realistic in every form of the word. It felt good to be seen and represented on a deeper level. Every thought and actual felt accurate and unique to the character in so many ways.

It’s written so beautifully, and executed in the perfect way. I will be picking up a physical copy the second it comes out.

Mark your calendars fro September 5th i promise you’re not going to regret it !

Thank you to Peachtree Teen and Netgalley for sending me an early copy of this book! All opinions are my own!

Where do I start with how obsessed I am with this book? Should I start with the Victorian era medicine that has always captured so many hearts in this modern era? Should I start with the rollercoaster that is the romance? Or maybe the heart wrenching autism representation? Or how about the beautiful growth of self-discovery and self-love that happens with the trans representation? Or maybe the battle against the patriarchy and how much female rage it bubbled up within me?

Do I really need to say more to get you to read this book?? What are you still doing here? This was a haunting tale of the ways that society can steal the joys of your passions and the love of your true self all in one. It's a story of strength in the face of these harrowing thoughts and the ways in which love and hope can break through and shatter it all.

As a chronically ill female in modern medicine, this book felt like a love letter straight to my soul.

**PLEASE be sure to read the content warnings for this book before picking it up!!**

I feel like this book has done exactly what it set out to do, and it’s beautiful. I see myself in writing for the first time. The story was a bit slow at first, and took me a while to get through, but I liked the middle and end part the most.