Luckmonkey

Luckmonkey drew me in with the text description, and I was not disappointed to find much to appreciate here as the story unfolded. Alysia Constantine provides readers with a world of believable characters and speaks to the importance of activism as an integral part of the story.

This was a challenging little read for me, but well worth the effort for what I got out of it, and it checks so many of the boxes that I'm looking for when I'm looking to read and love something: queer characters, brown characters, life observations, a bit of existentialism, an ending that doesn't make me think the author was just done writing about these character and gave them what they needed to get out of her hair. The characters are complex, diverse, and so credibly crafted that I wonder at their inspirations.

Although I believe so few of the things these characters believe in terms of their worldview and philosophies, I empathized with their adherence to their credo, and found their points of view to be absolutely valid despite my differences in opinion.

The dynamics of the initial group were both complicated and almost instantly readable, in a way that you can happen upon a bunch of people together and know which two people are tight, who might be a little in love with who, who the dominant personality is and what other people may think about that as they react to them. So too did you walk into where these characters were squatting and just understand the baseline dynamic, which made watching as those dynamics shifted very compelling.

This one will have to sit with me a while before I've sussed out exactly how I feel about it, but my initial reaction is that this book is going to be Loved, entirely, by some people, and not understood at all by others. I don't know that I loved it, but I will be thinking of T and Bert and Twee and Kohl for some time.