This was a pretty good horror thriller standalone! It left some threads dangling but wrapped up the story for the three sisters nicely. I keep telling everyone that the first 50 pages are “no plot, just vibes” but by page 100 it was still lots of vibes mixed with plot. It’s a very aesthetic novel with some graphic body horror elements like bugs crawling out of skin, flowers growing in wounds, lots of imagery of decay. There’s no romance whatsoever so if you want a book with romance...this is not the one. But I loved the characters they all felt unique with their own motivations and desires. There’s also LGBTQ+ rep that felt natural and the MC is bisexual so that was really nice to see. And even though there wasn’t any explicit romance we do get to see the main character’s internal thoughts about being attracted to different men and women she sees throughout the story. It was a pretty interesting read as well and I was both surprised and unsurprised at the ending but I liked it!

I think one of the only things that wasn’t my favorite was the writing style. It’s set in modern day and the language is really...unbelievable? It’s hard to describe and I’m not the best with words but these teenagers use aesthetic sounding SAT words sprinkled throughout and it doesn’t sound natural. It feels like the author was trying to sound cool and aesthetic and it’s like a romanticized styling to enhance the feel of these characters and the novel but in the end just ended up taking me out of the story. A few examples were words like absinthe or “absenthine” and “liminal” and “fetid” were used multiple times and at one point I was just like...ok I get it you’re the edgey kid who writes slam poetry and hangs out under the stairs. There were also a few moments that belong under “the rule of cool” where if it sounds cool it doesn’t matter if it feels real or not. One of them was when the mean girls of the school were described as filling Iris’s backpack with dead birds? Maybe I’m just lucky but I’ve never seen any mean girls do something like that.
These weren’t a huge deal or anything and it was only a minor inconvenience while reading and I could ignore them enough to enjoy the story and chalk it up to an attempt to give the story a certain feel even if it wasn’t realistic (it is fiction after all). This was one of the only things that kept me from giving it a full 5 stars.