Simple yet surprisingly complex. It’s got a strong verisimilitude quality, without being too granular. I also really liked how intersectional messy it is, as well as the overall tone. The characters are rendered very vividly primarily through dialogue, which was really interesting.

I think this could have been a 5 star read had I consumed it in text format because, while the narrators were good, it also exposed some problems with the text when read aloud. Now,I am not saying every text should be able to be read aloud, I do not believe that to be the case. But the problem I had in this particular case is that stylistic choices authors sometimes page for pagination - in this case, specifically adding dialogue tags that are invisible while reading - do not translate well to audio. You know when says/said is not invisible? When it’s spoken out loud. It is so grating and it actually tilts the narrators voice into a simplistic monotone that can’t really be avoided. I also just don’t think you need any dialogue tags whatsoever in most of these scenes because usually it’s only two people speaking. When body language enters the equation, and dialogue has purpose, you really just have no need of tags. But it does have an anesthetic purpose when looking at a page of text.

Long story short: I definitely recommend reading this rather than listening to it. As a straight white dude, I really can’t speak to the queerness of the text, but felt it contributed to the verisimilitude, so rather enjoyed it, even if it didn’t feel tonally innovative to queer stories I’ve consumed previously (a short coming I’ve read in other reviews). So, if you’re looking for thoughts on that aspect of the text, please look at other reviews~