This book is a wild ride! It may be a novella, but it has so much to say. At the heart, it's a story about a desperate need to conformity out of internalized homophobia, wanting to belong and yearning for normalcy, but ending up miserable and lonely. It's also a corporate satire, illustrating the absurdity of the beauty industry, but also, the corruption, and toxic work environments. And in the end, it's a folk horror tale of fighting to live your life as true to yourself as you can in a society that tries to paint you as wrong, as something monstrous.
From creepy, unsettling, and tense, to gory, bloody, satirical, and even romantic, this book will bring you to the team building at the remote lodge in Zagorje, a beautiful hill region of Croatia known for the wine, where you'll find lonely sapphic coming to her breaking point.
If you're interested in Slavic folk tales, this one is a reimagining of the story of Babaroga, giving her a more modern, queer twist (Baba Roga, a lesser known monstrous woman of Slavic folklore said to eat bad kids, similar to Baba Yaga, only, she has no house with chicken legs, but a horn protruding out of her forehead). I find it interesting how Ivana connects the story of our famously "conventionally unattractive" woman to the world of cosmetic surgery.