Okay, so this had me tearing up on at 4% in . . . just saying. I chose this from KU bc of the short I read a couple of days previous, and like, WOW. I immediately purchased it after finishing it.

OMG, okay. (Be cool, me.) I’m pretty sure I have a new favorite author (it’s a tier, not a person) and may have to physically restrain myself from tearing through the back list. (But, TBR? I’m so sorry, you’re probably going to have to wait.)

Jay is a new favorite character, for SURE. This open, vulnerable, self-aware but can’t help any of his ADHD impulses, good-hearted boy! We get most of the first half of the story from his perspective (I think the choices of which parts of the story come from which character are very well chosen. It’s not a typical ping pong situation, and we do get one outlier POV, but it didn’t bug me here in the way it has in other stories. It seems like a deliberate explanatory aside, happened early and then we were back to the main story.)

This isn’t really breaking new ground, plot-wise, but maybe it’s the perspectives we get? The settings of urban decay that are canvases for art? And the scene that gives us the metaphor of the title? Reader, it slew me. It also has the kind of epilogue that makes me cheer and clap.