I really liked most stories but others felt very…. White and cishet which makes me question why would authors that fit those descriptions be included in this (even if they’re writing about non white and cishet characters??)

The writing of this book was so genuinely awful that I almost stopped reading it after every chapter.

The writing felt like something a 50 y.o. privileged white woman would write about what they think the lives of POC and non-cis people look and sound like. The entire thing felt clunky, uncomfortable, and clearly out of touch. A random example of out-of-touch teenage writing that really stuck out to me was when a teenage character (presumably a teenager in the year 2017 - but even more out of touch as the years go on) described their parents as celebrating their “silver anniversary”. What teenage would know or care to refer to it as that?

The only thing that kept me engaged was to find out the mystery of who the killer is and it was not worth it.

you spend the second half of the book wondering who did it and trying to solve the murder and it was, of course, the least developed, most boring character it could be?

Maybe I just didn’t fully understand what this book was about but man was it hard to power through. I was under the assumption that it was about mushroom characteristics being used to offer another idea of life outside/after capitalist ruin but instead it felt way more like the history of the matsutaki mushroom which is…. Boring? Fine but not at all something I wanted to spend time on

Why did I wait so long to finally read this??? Everything about this book was so amazing. Intensely queer, wildly funny, introspective, and an insight to the world’s rigidity. I already want to reread it