Dry, dull reading with a disorganized timeline about a fascinating time in history.

As someone who has also worked creatively with Saint Joan of Arc's Trials, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Those who are not as familiar with the story or source material can appreciate the detail and emotion put into the poetry. I loved how Elliott played with form and shape, but the ebook edition made some of the poems difficult to read. The reoccurring fire's voice was haunting.

Reading this gave me the haunting feeling that too many women have gone through similar experiences of stalking from men in power. Freitas conveys her dread in a skin-crawling way that almost all women are familiar with. Oh he's just being nice. Oh, he's just being friendly. How quickly these behaviors become unwelcome and uncomfortable.

I think books like these are important for cisgendered men to read to have better empathy for the female experience.

I feel like I missed something here. Like the second mermaid... there was so much mystery around it I couldn’t tell what the mystery was supposed to be. Beautiful writing, though.

I had a difficult time with this book. There is so much talk about about animals and so many animal metaphors. The metaphors were distracting. There is very little talk about actually managing anxiety as a condition. The anxiety discussed in this book is stress-based anxiety as Breuning does not seem to believe in medically diagnosed generalized anxiety disorder. As an anxiety sufferer, I found this incredibly patronizing. There were a few helpful tips, but overall, this book was frustrating to read. The repetitive bullet points at the end of the chapters made this book seem like an educational pamphlet, which again, felt patronizing.

Having previously read the unabridged novel of Les Miserables, I was familiar with all of the characters and plot lines not covered in the stage version. I loved this adaptation. I enjoyed reading it. The character design is fantastic and funny. This adaption is probably not for book purists, but it was the most fun reading I'd had in a while.