Finished this in a couple sittings in one day. Something about it had me completely immersed (or maybe just had a lucky day in the midst of a reading slump). More books about girls being “gross” but not really gross, just being girls! Living! Thinking! Desiring! Minus the excessive references of urine, I felt like this little novel balanced rot and uncouth content pretty well. I feel that a lot of novels lately will throw in something extreme or explicit for the shock factor, but it reads rather boring. Here, I think Hval links that to something more, like mold sitting beneath the surface waiting to sprout — being a woman in a public space, being a woman in a private space, and so on.