This was honestly a little hard to get through, but in the end I really liked it, and there are some beautiful lines in it.

This is a really, really beautiful book. I can't explain too much, or I'd give it away, but its about music and hell and teenage girls and violence and popular culture and being alone and making friends and how to survive adolescence, told through the eyes of (mostly) young women and with a delightful supenatural twist. Get you teenage daughter to read this, it seems dark on the outside but, unlike the other book about an awkward teenage girl looking to escape adolescence (Twilight) this one has a solid core of hope. I'm going to rave about this one for a while. Read it.

I really wanted to like this book.

An Australian author, writing female characters and using an Australian setting? Indigenous, trans and queer characters? Music references? Sounds great.

Unfortunately, too much time is spent on some of the interweaving storylines (especially if you count the information about young female killers as a storyline) and not enough on others; ultimately, this book tries to do a lot of really interesting things but doesn't have enough time to make them as interesting as they deserve to be. Some of the rare or marginalised character types were dealt with so briefly that they felt tokenistic, and I felt uncomfortable about how the Aboriginal characters (major and incidental) and their mythologies were handled.

However, the main issue that I had with the book is likely the very thing that makes it appeal so strongly to some other reviewers: the writing style is one that I associate strongly with the fanfiction community, in not only its works but its general discourse. Not having been involved in the community, and with most of my experiences of said style involving some very poor writing, this really makes the writing miss the mark for me.

It's also fair to say that while the multiple POV characters have the potential to add depth and texture to the work, they lack unique voices. Even the excerpts from (fictional) music journalism come across as simply more of the author's own voice, and characters talk to each other and themselves in the same way across the various time periods that the book covers.

Two stars rather than one, because there were some nice ideas here and I think a more mature version, perhaps in series form rather than a single book, would be very impressive.

I should point out that I blame Tumblr for leading me to this. I had seen a post promoting this book, thought it sounded interesting and bought a copy for my ereader. (And then it turned out that the wrong synopsis was posted, but I thought “Eh, we’ll still give it a shot.”) And then, in the middle of this, I got to the scene with Ben’s rant about “If teenage girls like a thing, it’s automatically derided,” and I went “Wait a second, I’ve read this before! It’s that Tumblr post!”

So there’s that.

This is an incredibly hard book to sum up in a few paragraphs. Not that it was confusing or hard to follow, but feels like the kind of book that’s just so good you can’t describe it behind “Just trust me on this one.” It’s probably not going to work for everyone, but when it does work, oh my God does it work. Borsellino’s writing is this hypnotically haunting piece of work with so many layers and twists to the story, that even though I was muttering “The fuck did I just read,” I meant that in a good way.

There’s four different narratives in this, intertwining and bleeding through each other, and I genuinely did not know what the truth was going to be until I got to the very end. Like, I honestly thought up until the mid-point that Ella was writing her letters in jail, but she’s seeing it as her own personalized hell. The whole story of Amy and Sally traveling across Australia and trying to figure out what they were looking for took such a hard left turn, that I was sitting going “Wait, what? What the fuck?” And this is all background for a series of articles on a band called Hush, whose members are intrinsically linked to Ella and Sally and Amy.

This is a book about finding family in the darkness of the world and finding that love in spite of the darkness. And that people who do terrible things sometimes do them out of loneliness or fear—they’re not absolved from the things that they’ve done, but it doesn’t mean they can’t try to repent. Most of the heart of this comes from Ella, or at least it was for me. Here’s the thing with Ella—her story is a very thinly veiled version of the Columbine shootings, here called Cobweb, to the point where there are specific details (like her school being in Colorado and that her friends would make custom Doom levels). I’ve mentioned that Columbine had probably a bigger effect on me than 9/11 did (not saying one event was worse than another, but there’s a reason that I get so upset when I hear about mass shootings and how often that they’ve happen), so for me to say that I found myself sympathizing with Ella is huge. Especially because she is unrepentant for what she’s done, and that feels like the shootings were the right thing to do. But what I liked about it is that Ella’s not absolved for what she’s done, she doesn’t expect to be absolved, she knows why she’s in Hell and that she can’t take back what she’s done.

The scene of Ella and Stacy sitting in front of the memorial at their old school is just such a powerful moment, because they’ve been painted as the Demon and the Saint by time and media, but they’re just two ordinary girls who made two different decisions that ended up destroying them. And then when you learn that Cherry and Tash are their little sisters who ended up becoming best friends and creating something new with Hush—there’s so much that could be clichéd with how things are revealed but it feels so organic within the plot.

(I should mention that the only thing that doesn’t quite work for me is that you have the thinly veiled Columbine reference, and Borsellino makes thinly veiled references to Matthew Shepherd and Coco Chanel, but reveals that no, she’s actually talking about the real people. The moments they got mentioned kinda jarred me out of the book because there’s at least some differences between Cobweb and Columbine, and yet the stories told about Sam Brightwater and Vivi Verdun are the exact life stories. Those were the only moments that I stopped reading and went “But…okay, why would you do that.”)

While Ella’s story directly ties into Hush, the Sally and Amy backstory is a slow burn into revealing what roles they ultimately play in the end. I think this is the one part that really won’t work for a lot of people, because it feels so disconnected from the rest of the book until we got to the reveal at the very end. But Sally and Amy’s journey is much more hypnotic and drew me into the story more trying to figure out what their connection to the plot is.

And then there is the actual WHAT THE FUCK reveal that Amy is an actual demon—I actually thought that Sally and Amy were going to be the Lesbian Vampire Murders mention by Charlotte in her articles, but when Ella mentioned Amy’s brothers Caim and Murmur I was going “Wait what’s going on here?” But what I did like about the reveal isn’t that Amy isn’t wrecking hell on Earth, she’s just trying to make her way through life, and taking away other people’s pain. And that when Sally figures out that something’s up with Amy, she’s genuinely conflicted about the state of her soul. I really loved that this book ends with them starting their own family, and that it ends up being the grandparents who raise Ben and Jacqui.

While the Hush sequences feel like the weakest part of the book, I actually enjoyed them the best out of the three major storylines. I really liked how Borsellino portrays the band through Charlotte’s articles—we get just enough characterization of all the band members, and enough hints to their backstory and what their connections are to the other plotlines. And I also really liked that Borsellino captures the fandom of Hush and how the band reacts to it—I’ve said that YA books dealing with music sometimes don’t really give a grasp on a fictional band’s fandom and music, and I loved how Borsellino wrote about Hush. And she also makes them feel more realistic, and not just token characters—Jacqui’s being trans is dealt with in a near-scandal, but she talks about it frankly and the world moves on. And even Cherry and Tash’s connection to Cobweb is mentioned, but it’s not lingered on until things become clearer in the text of Ella’s letters.

This is an incredibly ambitious book, and I don’t think there’s a lot of writers out there who could pull it off as well as Borsellino has. Aside from a couple of things that kind of break the world of the book, this just pulled me in completely, and wouldn’t let go until I got to the end. I highly recommend tracking this one down, and I’m very interested in reading more of her work.

It’s really hard to explain the appeal of this book, even though I gave it five stars; I didn’t even know what category to put it in on Goodreads. Is it fantasy? Well it has fantastic elements, but … mostly it’s about criminals. Is it a crime novel? In the sense that crimes are committed, but it doesn’t feel like a crime novel. Is it horror? Horrific things happen, but it seems to hopeful to be classed as a proper horror story. Which I guess is kind of the point: the story resists classification. It’s all things to all people, depending on who you are and what you need.

(That is not to say that this book is for everyone. If you are sensitive to graphic violence, suicide, self-harm, or school shooting narratives, this book runs a very high risk of triggering you. Keep that in mind when deciding whether or not to read it.)

The simplest way to sum it up is by describing the plot, but even that is difficult. There are three main narratives here: in one, the hellbound ghost of a school shooter writes letters to her still-living little sister. In another, the sister’s punk band is covered by a reporter who sees herself in their music. And in the third, set fourty years before the others, two girls hitchike across Australia, trying to find home. But these stories crisscross and overlap, and I don’t think I could even begin to untangle all the ways in which they’re connected. I’d need a family tree for that. And the connection is kind of the point, too: all these women (all the main characters/narrators are women) are connected, either by blood or by the feeling of being a “monster,” an outcast. The book never makes excuses for the bad things the characters do, but reading their own words, you can begin to understand them. All of these characters feel like they’re on the outside looking in, whether by reason of prejudice (racism, homophobia, transphobia) a bad family life, or just emotions they’ve never been able to understand or control. They’re all violent, just in different ways. Some deal with it better than others.

Saying the ending is ultimately downbeat or ultimately hopeful is reductive, I think; like I said, the book is all things to all people, and while my instinct would be to read the ending as a sort of redemption- not forgiveness, not understanding, but grace- not everyone will react the same way. But that’s what’s so great about it. You take the meaning you need. There aren’t many books I could say the same for.

I really wanted to like this book.

An Australian author, writing female characters and using an Australian setting? Indigenous, trans and queer characters? Music references? Sounds great.

Unfortunately, too much time is spent on some of the interweaving storylines (especially if you count the information about young female killers as a storyline) and not enough on others; ultimately, this book tries to do a lot of really interesting things but doesn't have enough time to make them as interesting as they deserve to be. Some of the rare or marginalised character types were dealt with so briefly that they felt tokenistic, and I felt uncomfortable about how the Aboriginal characters (major and incidental) and their mythologies were handled.

However, the main issue that I had with the book is likely the very thing that makes it appeal so strongly to some other reviewers: the writing style is one that I associate strongly with the fanfiction community, in not only its works but its general discourse. Not having been involved in the community, and with most of my experiences of said style involving some very poor writing, this really makes the writing miss the mark for me.

It's also fair to say that while the multiple POV characters have the potential to add depth and texture to the work, they lack unique voices. Even the excerpts from (fictional) music journalism come across as simply more of the author's own voice, and characters talk to each other and themselves in the same way across the various time periods that the book covers.

Two stars rather than one, because there were some nice ideas here and I think a more mature version, perhaps in series form rather than a single book, would be very impressive.

This is certainly an ambitious book. It spans two countries, half a century, and more characters than you can conceivably keep straight (unless you take notes, which might be your best option). It wants to impart so much thought on Christianity, alienation, murder, etc, etc..

YMMV, of course, but it didn't convince me. I couldn't keep track of all the characters, especially the ones who went by multiple names. While the novel plays around with different formats – sometimes narrative, sometimes letters, sometimes music journalism – the actual "voice" of the many different characters was very samey. It was also really preachy in some parts, which was bad enough when I agreed with the sentiment, and worse still when I didn't. (I just can't buy humanity being inherently evil.) I also did not care about any of the serial killers, bank robbers, etc. whose life stories got infodumped and ended up taking a lot of space in the novel. Lastly, while I appreciate that this novel sets out to include representatives from different social groups that are usually marginalised, I agree with this excellent review that their treatment often seemed tokenistic (I'm thinking especially of the trans band member).

I don't really want to be all doom and gloom, because the writing certainly had potential, and maybe if the themes (Christianity, humans being evil, etc.) had been more to my taste I'd have been able to overlook the other stuff. So, I don't know. I would certainly recommend this for anyone interested in serial killers/mass murderers. Provided you don't mind some fantastical elements like demons thrown in, of course.