Very original and compelling idea, but the narrator was so whiny and unlikeable that I had to literally force myself to finish the book.

This was....Ok. That's what two stars means, yeah? Ok? Yeah. Ok.

In theory this should have been a home run. And it's one of those situations where you finish a book, and can't decide if the lack of appreciation for it is the book's fault, or your own. But the book can't fucking review ME, so here we are.

I had a couple of problems with this book, that kept pushing me outside the enjoyment area and into the 'tolerate because it's not quite bad enough to DNF' area:
1) the main character. Whether the now-Phoebe, or the then-Phoebe....gawd what a whiny mind to have to inhabit.
2) the horror: Where's it at? At best, the book gets slightly discomfiting. I was hoping for some real body horror, but the prose was so flowery and vague, the part really fell short for me.

I look through the reviews and see that I'm in the minority on my feelings about this novel. So maybe it WAS me. All I know is that I've scraped the oxidized, depressing residue of this book from under my nails, and I'm ready to move on.

I was introduced to Kiste via author [a:Leo X. Robertson|7870281|Leo X. Robertson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1571602104p2/7870281.jpg]---he featured her in his podcast (Losing the Plot, episode 9) and one of his short stories led me to the [b:Hardened Hearts|36595730|Hardened Hearts|Eddie Generous|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1510691573l/36595730._SX50_.jpg|58346480] collection where I read her "40 Ways to Leave Your Monster Lover"---I was hooked.

Despite the high expectations her story created, this book did not disappoint. We see a small group of late-teen girls fall under a mysterious illness---their physical decline paralleling the industrial decline of their hometown (Cleveland, Ohio). An entire town down on its luck unsurprisingly turns on its own as these girls begin to rust and leak, as if their bones had become some corrupted metal. At the center of all this is Phoebe. Once, her focus might have been escaping a smalltown fate bereft of opportunity, but she quickly finds herself in the middle of events as her best friend and cousin is one of the Rust Maidens. Kiste deftly navigates between the present (decades after these events) and piecing the story together with chapters located squarely in the past. The novel's subtle horror is hauntingly woven into the decimation of the working class, as well as the way young women are often ostracized, silenced, and/or forced to conform physically. A wonderful tension and supernaturalness pervades the whole book.

Kiste writes well, especially when describing the Rust Maidens’ uncanny physical transformations and the guilt-ridden inner turmoil of the protagonist. (I never quite believed she was a woman in her forties, but that may have been intentional, a depiction of arrested development due to her teenage trauma.) I sometimes felt impatient for the protagonist to actually do something to move the plot rather than mostly angsting at it, but that may be my flaw, not the book’s.

The author really nailed the feel of working class Cleveland: the food, the drinking, the way everybody in the neighborhood was in everybody else’s business. It was moderately creepy (I’ve seen this categorized both as horror and as dark fantasy), but I wanted it to be creepier. Perhaps the subtext was too much.... text. This was largely about the way that girls were controlled and policed and how some of them rebelled, but it felt a bit heavy handed sometimes.

Smart, class-conscious, feminist body horror. I heard a lot about this book on horror bookstagram, and I wasn’t disappointed.