A solid entry into the genre.

The obtuse academic language makes this pretty inaccessible. I think I've got the gist of her theory - turns out she wrote another book (Bodies That Matter) partially to clarify her abstractions. 

What I got from this: gender is the collection of actions we take to express ourselves, performing under the structures of power in our societies. Because this was foundational in queer theory, it's not an unknown perspective to me; this made it slightly easier to parse such a dense text. 

I chose this as a bookclub read specifically because the content warning list had me 👀, but I think the characters were a little too flighty for me to rate it higher than a 3.5 star read. The dynamics suit a higher stakes plot, maybe with some magic and life-or-death situations.

I just didn't vibe with the main character, which is disappointing because I loved this author's take on urban-fantasy and was excited to see an even longer series in the genre.

I'm glad my suspicions about Vince's heritage were well-founded, even if the overall backstory was still a surprise to me. I went into this book assuming it was the last of the series, but it looks like it's the end of Part 1. It also appears that this author has disappeared from the internet after 2023. I hope that if she continues this series, it will be soon enough for me to remember what happened!

I appreciate the timeskips within this book because there's a lot of changes that could only realistically come to fruition if the characters had weeks/months to heal, train and learn. We finally learned a littl  bit about Vince's childhood - and maybe a lil something about Tom Tildeum too.

I knew that Waco was a stain on the FBI's reputation, but I didn't realize how little they did right during the whole operation.

I am glad that once Vince got his

"human" mind back he didn't immediately refuse to rely on his fae half again in the future due the guilt, but walked himself through the pros and cons of utilizing it as a weapon in the war he can no longer avoid

. It subverts a trope  that happens often in fantasy books, where a main character refuses to use tools out of principle.

Extremely engaging and definitely a bit gross for the squeamish among us. I wish she had gone more in-depth about neurodivergency in relation to mysophonia, but I suppose that's outside the scope of the book.