"I am bad and I am not worth saving."

There's no way I can do this book justice. It feels more like real life than any other book I've read. It's like if Danez Smith wrote a novel.

This was pitched to me as "three Black siblings return home to the gated community they grew up in after their haunted childhood home kills their parents" and "a non-standard haunted house story about the legacy of racism" and it's so much more than that. Our protagonist Ezri is a genderqueer fat Black Jewish parent with diabetes and multiple cluster-B personality disorders. Every one of their family members sits at the intersection of many states of being and it makes them all feel so much more real to me. I have met these people. I am these people. This is a book about the weight and pain of legacy: not just anti-Blackness, or transphobia, or homophobia, or family abuse, or sexual abuse of children by adults, but also how our parents are ghosts that live inside of us like how their parents lived inside of them. And then the final 10% recontextualizes everything that happened before in such a way that I immediately wanted to start over from the beginning again. Also wasn't expecting this book to step on old dyslexia trauma from school, OOF.

"I am the Omelas child."

If you have the SLIGHTEST interest in what I'm saying, just grab a copy. I'm going to need to buy my own after this because an audiobook is not conductive to writing quotes down. (Sidenote: the narration is execellent.)