Thanks to the publisher and the author for making this available on NetGalley for an honest review.

First of all: this book is partly dedicated to the author's cats, and frankly, I think they should have included pictures. I want to see Salt An, Peppa and Frederica Bimmel.

I think when you read the blurb and the tags for a book, you automatically make some assumptions about the plot. This book didn't match any of my assumptions. It was almost impressively how different it is from the fun thief romance shenanigans I visualized.

You know those narrators who are so unreliable, they basically lie to your face in first person POV? Ella Gatz is one of them. This occasionally made for a confusing or frustrating reading experience, but interesting at the same time. This girl is a chess prodigy, and she's playing 3D chess in real life with real people as pawns. I had some pretty wild theories for where the plot was going, and none of them were right (still kinda sad about one of them), but it came with its own wild plots instead. Ella is a complex and maybe a bit morally grey character who is NOT a reliable narrator by any means, but you can see the childhood that led her to become this person, and she's a great character.

I do need to mention that this book deals with domestic abuse in a significant way. It's pretty "closed door" and more implied than explicit in description, but it gives the whole book a threatening, tense air.

The protagonist is sapphic asexual, and there are multiple sapphic side characters.