⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐🐊🐊🐊

Have you ever felt cabin fever from a book? A feeling of itchiness under your skin, a rampage in your chest, a possession of your will demanding of you to do something. That's what this book was to me. 

I could tell you all of the checkboxes it marks in terms of classifying it as a diversity read, and maybe I will at the end of this review, but instead, I want to tell you about humanity. This book encapsulates what it means to be human and what it means for an author to write a fictional character that feels real. I felt true sorrow and confusion and compassion while I was reading these pages. Each character was so imperfect and flawed and so much like someone I could have met in line for coffee that I was taken aback consistently at how these people weren't real. At least not physically. 

Grappling with trauma placed upon you by others, the consequences of your actions, how family can be something that you make, how to survive when the world is burning around you, and how to come together and fall apart and find yourself in the pieces. This book takes place over the time period that was plagued by the pandemic and the injustices that revitalized the Black Lives Matter movement. I remember feeling so helpless and useless during that time and seeing Tookie reckon with those experiences too and then find closure felt like I was finally finding closure. 

This review is likely too vague and flowery to be of much help, but I hope it communicates the sense of wonder that reading this book gave me. And since I mentioned it, if you're looking for a diversity or social justice read, I give you the following tags:
- bisexual main character
- Native American main character
- various different Native American tribe and/or lineage representation
- life during the COVID-19 pandemic
- the Black Lives Matter movement
- police brutality, incarceration, life after incarceration
- found family and motherhood
- self love, self care, and healing
- good soup