You know when you go onto Ao3, don’t add any filters to your search, and two pages of results in you end up on the side of the site where it’s demented, gorey, and there’s a couple “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” fics, but nothing illegal yet? This is basically what reading this feels like. Though, everything about this—the dedication to misrepresenting every single mental disorder and illness depicted, the occasional fashion mentions, and the overt edginess(homophobic and ableist slurs included, lol)—make it a relic of its 2013 publication.

Do not ask me to list the pros and cons of the writing. The only pro I can really think of is that the writing style was sometimes engaging.

(The logistics of anything in this book fall on their face if you think too much, but I didn’t really care about that. There is no world where I would read mafia sports fiction where the main sport isn’t even real, and expect a story that makes sense. My main issue was with how unpleasant it was to read)

I put this in the “books that made me cry” shelf because reading this book ruined my mood twice. (Okay. One of those times was just external circumstances adding up, though, and the thought of reading the last 30 pages was enough to make me break.) I’ve heard the second book is better, though, so I might still read it. I will try to not be on the cusp of a breakdown this time.

Trigger warnings, for anyone who needs them: Ableism (in the narrative and from other characters), child abuse, physical and emotional abuse, murder, sexual assault (on-page, drugging involved), rape (implied) + rape jokes, homophobic slurs, a found family so dysfunctional I forgot that was one of the tropes.