I absolutely loved the first three quarters of this book for its visceral prose, strong cast of characters struggling to find themselves and stick together despite the circumstances, and the eerie, slowly unfolding horror of the wilderness camp. However, the ending didn't quite stick the landing for me, especially in terms of pacing, but I'll get more into that later. 

For starters, I love the way Gretchen Felker-Martin writes horror; her prose is so vivid and nasty and bodily that you can really feel it, and she does a fantastic job of building and maintaining tension. Seriously, I am so impressed by the way she can deliver just a few well-chosen details and paint an entire picture of some monstrosity, or give you just a little hint into a character's life and trauma that makes you all the more invested in their story. I opened this book basically completely exhausted after a great concert, just to glance at it, and couldn't put it down until I'd finished the opening chapter entirely. I'd describe this book overall as cinematic, which means it really gives a clear picture of all the horrible things happening within, which I personally really enjoyed! 

I also found the characters to be very strong overall. It felt like they all had a real sense of history to each of them and flaws that made me really care about them and their relationships to each other. I do think Felker-Martin did a great job of showing the way that trauma will stick with people and shape the rest of their lives, and I personally love those sorts of consequences for characters. The horror elements of the story also absolutely worked for me; it really delivered on gross creature horror and uncanny valley stuff, while also highlighting the brutality that lgbt+ kids can face with society turning a blind eye or even supporting it. 

Without spoilers, I think the reason this book doesn't have a higher rating for me when I enjoyed the beginning so much is that I think the pacing jumped around too much towards the end for me to really enjoy it. There's a pretty major time skip that I felt like both rushed the events leading up to said time skip and the ones after it, making the book's ending feel underdeveloped and weak. The ending also took Cuckoo from being a novel with some parallels/homages to Stephen King's It to one that seems to be engaging with It very directly, in a way that felt detrimental to Cuckoo's ability to stand on its own. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of It and enjoyed some of the ways Felker-Martin sort of responded to issues within King's work, but I also felt like this took away from Cuckoo as an individual work, especially when I couldn't stop noticing the parallels. Overall, I think the ending just felt rushed and unsatisfactory to me, and really lost a lot of the tension that had been built up throughout the book to that point. 

After reading Manhunt, I knew to expect this, but Cuckoo absolutely doesn't shy away from the violence these teenagers are experiencing and depicting all of their biases and issues of the time period, too. While I sort of interpreted a lot of this as Felker-Martin working to accurately portray the thoughts and feelings of a bunch of messed-up teenagers, the amount of fatphobia, racism, and general violence these teenagers experience cannot be overstated and definitely might put some people off. 

With spoilers:

I really feel like the jump to adulthood and the main characters all coming back together to hunt down the cuckoo just did not work for me. Like I said, all the momentum from the first section where they escape from the camp is lost, and we're not really given enough time to reacquaint ourselves with the main cast as adults before the action picks up very, very quickly. I sort of get why this section is here, with a theme of responsibility towards stopping more violence from being inflicted on younger generations and having to reckon with the past, but I just don't feel like it was executed very well. Also I really felt like the most interesting characters all died, which was kind of a bummer :^/. It's also in this section that, again, the It references really kick up a notch, where we go from a pretty distinct premise with a few parallels (like the cuckoo's origin, for example) to like... this is just a reworking of It's ending, almost. I don't know for sure, but it felt like Gretchen Felker-Martin wrote the first section, realized that those parallels were there, and decided to lean into it, with how similar the last section is to It. Again, the first section wasn't entirely completely unique (but no stories really are) but it still felt original and like its own discrete story, so it felt like a bit of a downgrade to just go into something so in conversation with a different novel? Or maybe I'm just too obsessed with It and am reading too much into the parallels, but either way, I didn't feel like the time skip or the ending were fleshed out enough to really work effectively. I also felt like some of the parallel moments didn't fit in very well... like the teenage orgy scene in Cuckoo is definitely LESS unpleasant and thematically flawed as the one in It, but that's not really saying much! I felt like the ending overall muddied Cuckoo's themes and intentions and sort of distracted from the rest of the book, in a way. This whole section also just wasn't frightening in the same way as the earlier portions, which was a bummer considering how well-crafted the earlier horrific moments were. This ending wasn't enough to ruin the whole book for me, and there were some good moments from it for sure, but it didn't match up to how strong the first portion of the book was for me.

Ultimately, there were a lot of things I really did love about Cuckoo, and though the ending definitely fell a little flat, I will be picking up Felker-Martin's next horror without a doubt.