Blurb: Ksenia and Josh are foster-kids who have lost everything except each other — and they’d do anything to stay together. That’s why Josh makes a deal with staggeringly beautiful, unrelentingly cruel fairies to take them away to another world. But this new life comes at a terrible price, and Ksenia isn’t willing to pay it. As the fairies’ lust for human emotion swells to threaten their entire town, including the friend they left behind, Josh and Ksenia might have to pay an even worse price to escape.
This book is about extremely flawed people who make bad choices for good reasons, and covers some dark topics (a relationship that verges on foster-sibling-incest that is not condoned by the narrative; mentions of past, off-page sexual assault; some images that might count as body horror? But I'm a scaredeycat about that stuff and wasn't bothered, so). It's desperate and poetic and sad and hopeful.
There are horrible cruel fairies and truly high stakes. There are teens who just love each other so much and don’t know how to show it right. There's the terror of being being known and understood by another person, and worse, being known and understood by yourself. And there's something so nice about reading a book in which the main characters care so hard. Everything in it, from the emotional arcs to the plot, are driven by how much they love and want to protect each other.
Of these three main characters, none of them are straight, which I love. You have people who already know and are comfortable with their identities, and others in various states of figuring themselves out. Ksenia has a less defined identity in that there's some discussion of how she's not really a girl or a boy, which is cool nonbinary representation, but I have some thoughts on it. A lot of how people see Ksenia's gender seems to rest on the ambiguity of her appearance. And don't get me wrong, I also love an androgynous aesthetic and people expressing gender identity through physical appearance. And this book in particular has wonderful descriptive writing. But sometimes the focus on what she looks like, how she can look like a guy or whatever, makes it feel like the book thinks Ksenia's appearance is why she's nonbinary. Maybe if we got more of Ksenia's thoughts on her gender identity, it wouldn't feel that way. But Ksenia never really thinks about it. Her nonbinariness is confirmed by other people (who have noticed things or are fairies who Know Things About You) who obviously are more limited in what they can tell us about her gender — which is perhaps why the focus seems to get stuck on what Ksenia looks like and what clothes she wears. I don't think that makes the representation bad, but I think it makes it feel less full than the incredibly-fleshed out emotions that crowd the book.
Anyway: emotional, flawed, queer teens trying really hard to save themselves but mostly each other. Dark content but fiercely hopeful. Beautiful writing and a weird, tingly-creepy fairy world. Appears to be a hit or miss kind of book, but I loved it.
If you like Holly Black's The Coldest Girl in Coldtown or The Darkest Part of the Forest, you should read this! If you read Sarah Porter's other book Vassa in the Night and liked the weirdness but could have used more sense-making weirdness, DEFINITELY read this.
