The most loving and messy family.
The warmest book.
I adored every flawed human in this novel.

I loved everything about these two queer Maori Russian siblings and their big chaotic family. The family! There are a million branches, they live in various countries, an this intricate web of biological and found, the family sprawls. They are related in complicated ways—by blood, choice, happenstance. This family is full of secrets and mistakes and loss but more than anything else they love each other.

That is what I keep coming back to, how deeply Greta and Valdin are loved by their big family, their parents and sibling and each other but also their extended family. There is so much love between all these people, and that doesn’t mean they're perfect. They don’t see each other, they hurt each other, they mess up, they are oblivious or protect each other in the wrong way, they don’t want to be around each other, they deal with various mental health stuff and emotional stuff and a other million things, and through it all, they love each other. I think this is actually hard to write, this kind of family that is so good but fucks up plenty, this family where there is present trauma and ancestral trauma, where the parents haven’t done a perfect job and the kids are struggling, but still: love, openness. 

I also loved how easy the romance is.

Valdin gets back together with his boyfriend, that is his main plot arc. He broke up with this man a year before in the midst of career crisis, quit his PhD, and could not explain to his boyfriend why he was so upset and angry. And when they get back together he’s had the time to figure himself out, to get to a different place in his life, to be on his own enough to see what he wants outside of his relationship. So their reunion is just really soft and lovely and serious from the start. I found it charming but not overly sentimental because it felt so real, it was so deeply about timing and that is real, like, sometimes you can’t do two things at once. The romance is this beautiful example of how Valdin couldn’t do his career and his relationship at once, he had to pause one to find some steadiness in the other, and sometimes pausing will change how you feel about someone, but not always, and not in this case,

I loved how it came together. 

I also love that Greta has this love interest she just gets along with from the beginning. There are no big problems, which is something I find boring in romances novels, but I did not find it boring here because I loved watching as she tumbled around living her life which was sometimes great and sometimes a mess and sometimes boring and sometimes awesome. This book reminded me that with the right characters who the hell cares what goes on! I could have read a book twice as long about these two siblings just doing their thing. 

Also, there are SO MANY QUEER SIBLINGS!