For the first half of this book, I was bored. I couldn't get into Kersti's story, either in the present as an adult who's unable to get pregnant or in the past as a child at a boarding school. None of the scenes from the past felt like they had any purpose in the narrative and all of the scenes in the present were so disjointed that it felt like half the narrative was skipped. So many important things happened off screen in between the pages and then would be recapped in the next chapter in that timeline months after the fact. It didn't make sense why she would choose to tell the story like this.

The whole unable to conceive plotline also did nothing for me. I wasn't aware going in that it was part of the story, let alone such a major part. It's not my favorite plot line in general, but definitely can be done well. Only it wasn't here. At no point did I ever feel like Kersti really wanted children. She wanted to fulfill her role as a woman. She wanted to fit into her family that she always felt distant from. She wanted to lose the feeling of inadequacy. But she never talked about actually wanting children. I was almost rooting for her to not have children because she seems like she'd be a terrible mother.

Then around the halfway point, Kersti decides that the best way for her to get pregnant is to use her friend's frozen eggs. Her friend who has been in a vegetative state since high school. Her friend whose mother had her eggs harvested while in that vegetative state. Her friend who clearly cannot give any kind of consent. And also, the friend's mother has already used her eggs to have another daughter. Why does Kersti want to do this? So she can breed more Cressidas. Her words, not mine. This is treated as normal.

I feel like anything else negative I could say about this book pales in comparison to that. For a while, I literally thought Kersti was going to be an obsessive stalker and the villain, but no apparently the book considers this an unusual situation but totally fine.

I honestly don't know what I just read. This wasn't the book I expected, and I cannot fathom this being a book anyone wanted. I was not a fan. It was so disappointing because I've really enjoyed Joanna Goodman's work before, but I found this so unpleasant.