Hoo boy. I... no. I was so, so excited for this one (bigender rep! An author who worked as a costume designer on my favourite TV show!) and it just did not work for me at all. I hate to give a poor review, especially to a book which has rep that we've never seen before, and I wouldn't do it if I thought a book was just not my cup of tea, but parts of this were disturbing and possibly harmful, so here we go.

The good:
- bigender rep, which I've never seen before in a book. I'd love to see more of it, and I'm so glad that books with protagonists who aren't cis are being published more frequently, especially when they're own voices. I know that the author of this book uses they/them pronouns but I don't know their gender identity, so I can't say if this is own voices or not; I have a feeling that it might be.
- a complex and often unreliable narrator, which is my personal favourite type of narrator, so a thousand yays for that.
- some nuanced discussion of people's relationship with God, within and outside of organised religion. I liked how characters who were part of the Catholic church had their own opinions on things and were shown to question doctrine without questioning their faith. That, to me, was realistic and sensitive.
- good depiction of Comic cons and the skeevy stuff that goes on there when the boundary between fans / creators / characters is crossed. I've been to cons with friends who have been assaulted because people allowed themselves to think of people as nothing more than characters, and it's a very real problem. It was interesting to see it depicted here.
- pretty capable writing, if a little bland.

The bad:
- what. The fuck. Was the plot?! It made sense up until about 65% of the way through, when all of a sudden we're hit with

Spoiler

child murder and people dumping the body in a swamp and an evil priest who literally says 'any last words?' before he tries to murder someone in a fiery inferno, like a Disney villain with none of the subtlety

.
- confession booths don't have vents, so it's not possible that Al/eks/is would have been able to listen to people's confessions in the way that they did. I can suspend my disbelief a little, but that was a bit much, really; the whole central conceit of the book just fell flat.
- the actual plot of the book as it's marketed (a bigender teen overhears a priest confess to molesting someone and the teenager then goes on a mission to solve the case) doesn't start until 63% of the way into the book. The entire first half - which I actually preferred! - is about them settling into life in their temporary home with their religious relatives, and trying to act as a guardian angel to other people in order to distract themself from their own problems and trauma. That, to me, was a way more interesting concept than the ridiculously melodramatic and overblown second half of the book, which was like a weird TV soap opera.

The ugly:
- the fact that the protagonist identifies themself as 'one of those gay rights people' but then immediately suspects the only gay person they know of being a paedophile, based on no other evidence besides the fact that they're gay. They literally say at one point that 'all evidence points to [character]', but the only evidence is that this character is gay and went to confession once. Is that gay rights? I think not.
- the protagonist is absolutely awful with respect to other people's boundaries. They keep randomly touching the person that they have a crush on, even though this person tells them repeatedly not to. They also listen to people's confessions in the confession booth without their knowledge or consent and then intervene in people's lives, which is just so out of order that it made it very hard to empathise with the character. I don't mind an unlikeable narrator, and this wouldn't make me give a book a low rating, but when Al/eks/is mentioned to one of the nuns that they had been doing this, it seemed to be forgiven when they made it clear that they had tried to help the people that they'd intervened with. This, to me, made it seem like their actions were supposed to be viewed as justifiable, but they just weren't.

Spoiler

They literally get someone's disabled brother removed from their family and put into a group home, and we hear that the group home placement 'isn't going well'. Al/eks/is literally ruins people's lives and has no consequences whatsoever.

All the awful things that the protagonist does are painted as totally fine, and they're just... not.
- the protagonist seemed incredibly mentally ill for the duration of this book, which is fine if that's actually touched upon and dealt with within the narrative, but it isn't here. They hear voices constantly (and they do actually hear them as auditory hallucinations, as is made clear when they overhear someone's confession and note that the voice 'sounds different') and seem to have constructed two totally separate personalities, Aleks and Alexis, to embody different facets of their personality, and experience a 'switch' similar to people with DID when they change gender. I can't say if that's accurate to bigender people or not because, as I said, I'm not bigender, but a lot of Al/eks/is' behaviour was very concerning in this book. They finally agree to get therapy at the end, but it's only very, very briefly mentioned. I would have liked a bit more discussion of how their gender was separate to their trauma, because the conflation of the two made it seem like their gender was almost a symptom of it, and I don't know how accurate that is to many bigender people.

Overall, I'm glad this book exists, but I wish it were better. I feel like it needed more editorial work and some more sensitivity reads.