This book couldn't decide what it wanted to be. Literary fiction or speculative fiction. The pacing is very slow for the first 50%, after that it does speed up a bit but most of the time I could not really care about what was going on. A lot of the conflict/plot seems forced. The character decisions made for the sake of plot propagation rather than logic always annoy me to no end. Also, for a book about adoption, there wasn't a lot of focus on Pepper and her adoptive moms' relationship. She seems to be adamant about finding her birth mother who never contacted/cared about her while her actual mothers that raised her are worried and she doesn't even manage to call them. Passages about "how this must be how it feels like between mothers and daughters" when Pepper thinks of Ula make no sense and seem to diminish adoptive parents.