(Won through a Goodreads giveaway! Thank you to author Bairbre Higgins for providing me a free e-copy.)

I wanted to like this book, with its strong sense of setting, tackling of LGBTQ and mental health and racial-prejudice issues, but I don’t think they were effectively addressed. The ending does help, though it feels a bit contrived since the Sprite Lady is utterly disconnected from the rest of the plot, and only appears about once each in the beginning, middle, and end. Although certain characters are painted as especially bigoted (Caleb Freeth), I didn’t feel that Ariel’s own biases were addressed, particularly since multiple Native American characters were described as having “honey-toned” skin and other exotic descriptors. There’s a lot of exoticism/other-ing, with the heavily-accented Russian dream interpretor, the stereotypically Chinese proprietor of the little restaurant back home, the Native American ghost in Shakespeare, and the torchbearers themselves (who turn out to be teenage malcontents fed up with the desert-based religious cult they were raised in).

Speaking of descriptors, there were far too many of those overall. In the acknowledgements the author thanks her father for his “precious thesaurus,” probably jokingly, but it really does read like a first-draft essay that someone took a thesaurus to, with long descriptions of every person, action, and locale that so much as catches Ariel’s peripheral vision.

Ariel. I know it’s a unisex name, but it threw me for a loop when, 40+% of the way through the book, people suddenly start addressing the main character as “Mr” and “sir” when the opening chapters never overtly hint at his gender, and given his relationship heteronormativity will, more likely than not, do you in. (I went back and read the Goodreads summary because I was genuinely confused, and found that it was also ambiguous.) Not sure whether that was the author’s intention, but that was a moment of reader alienation and marked the beginning of the decline for me — before then, I was prepared to give the book three stars, even four if it picked up later on. Also, his rants seemed out of the blue, random breaking points; the alleged OCD only shows up twice — once to be established, once as a minor inconvenience/private embarrassment — and then in one flippant joke about being cured, so I wouldn’t consider it good representation.

I had a lot of issues with believability — like when FBI Agent Pitcavage comes in and immediately briefs a civilian witness (and former suspect!) about the minutiae of a high-priority, high-clearance ongoing federal case, and even invites him along on a “low risk” raid to confirm identification of the new suspects. Maybe Higgins did even more research than I did and this is actually how things are done, but somehow I doubt it.

It’s also disappointing that there are no compelling female characters present; Ariel’s mother’s voice makes a few cameo appearances to worry about him, but his friends back home are all men; Miranda, a local teenager, is a clever young girl who somehow doesn’t think twice about striking up a close friendship with a strange man, an outsider to her small religious town (her father’s caution is more realistic, though (I think) still too trusting); her mother is the uptight, mistrustful police officer handling the murder, who suddenly warms up to Ariel when Miranda goes missing following the conveniently timed world-changing news of her adoption and Ariel becomes their only hope of contacting her.