Dear Ms. Delilah S. Dawson, you are my first 5 star author of 2025. I hope you stay filled with spite, harbor your grudges, and continue to write evil, awful ideas that give people nightmares (or help them sleep at night). This was incredible. I loved it. Thank you. 

My thoughts: 

This is perfectly fucked up. This is female rage in a book. I would have happily read more pages filled with more rage and death and details of the aforementioned rage and death. 

I liked Dez a lot. She was scrappy, hardworking, and had a clear cut goal. The fashion industry is a tough one to break into. 

My favorite character though is Valerie. Cunning, brilliant, and devious while maintaining a sense of cheer.

Reading some reviews, I see people complaining “that’s not how NDAs work.” Yeah, it’s not how they work—it was written in legalese with half the terms that would not be legal or enforced, because it is a scare tactic. Illegal activities are not covered by NDAs. You can go to the police or to a lawyer to report illegal activities. HOWEVER, in almost any decent lawyer’s NDA there will be some language to the effect that if any portion of the NDA is deemed to be illegal or not able to be enforced, that that section will be struck OR enforced to the fullest extent in accordance with the law of the state the contract was executed in and the rest of the NDA will still be valid. It is why whistleblowers sometimes still end up in financial or criminal trouble. 

Do you see how long that explanation is? And also how much that would cause a huge plot hole if any of the characters knew that (in my mind there is a clear explanation for why each character wouldn’t know that or had a reason to not care). Most people who are not lawyers do not understand what an NDA means or how to read it. A lawyer would have to know you, the laws of the state the NDA is to be enforced under, AND have read the NDA to properly give advice. 

NDAs are SCARY to laymen. If you aren’t scared of them you are probably a lawyer & even then you know to be careful of them. Clearly that was the purpose of the NDA here. I’m a lawyer, I didn’t have a problem with how the NDA was used in the book.