2.5 stars rounded up bc i feel bad about giving it 2 stars

Wow, this book was quite the ride !

For a long moment I thought the central theme was about changing class and how you end up alienated both from the people you leave behind but also from the people who form the class you joined and you belong nowhere, and also about how dangerous the attention of the rich and powerful is, and how things can look meritocracy but aren't, not where it matters.
Then it came through that the whole story is unified in its idea of how things change, and you stay afloat the best way you can, and sometimes the end result doesn't look pretty but you survived and that's what matter.
I really loved how cleverly that story was written, how elegantly (or, you know, on-the-nose-ly but in a fun way) clues were fiven to the readers so that we would jump to the right inference, and how the author decided to play around with both vampires and Jews in this story, picking up then putting back down paralels and contradictions in a self-aware way that was really nice to watch. (To be clear, this story ISNT antisemitic, but some vampires clichés are, and antisemitic myths do often give a distinctly vampiric vibe to jewish people so there you go, it's interesting to play with when you have jewish characters faced vith vampire-like creatures.)

I loved the work on maternity, on disability too, how very honest and human it all felt, how the characters were imperfect but touching. Often when people say "imperfect but touching" it means "inspiration porn" or "deeply, deeply unlikable except for that scene where they give a cigarette to someone" - this isn't the case here. They really work, and you can identify with them, even when they turn ugly.

I was having a good time with this book right until the end, where I then realized the author was way braver than I had feared and then I had a GREAT time. No spoiler, but picking that specific ending over anything else made a ton of sense, it was smart, it worked really well, and i'm quite surprised no editor made him change it. I loved it.

So, yeah, awesome work, Nat Cassidy.

4/4.5 stars

This was a really good read! Sure I think there were some things that I wasn’t the hugest fan of, but overall it was fantastic. A definite step up from Mary, which I already really enjoyed. I think the book being much shorter than Mary really helped it not feel like it was getting slow or drawn out as much as Mary did. I think having multiple POVs helped give this book more variety than having the POV be strictly inside Mary’s head (which I know was critical to the plot of Mary). This book reminded me a lot of Lock Every Door by Riley Sager, but it felt like a more well rounded, mature version. Overall a fantastic story!