This was an absolute rollercoaster. My mouth was gaping open throughout most of it. I have no words! 

If I’m honest, even though I felt bad for Ribbit in The Initial Insult, I had a feeling McGinnis was leading us down the path we ended up in. I don’t mind this because I appreciate having conflicting feelings about the actions of a character. Was Ribbit absolutely deranged and out of pocket in this? Yes. Did I lowkey understand his pyromaniac tendencies? Also yes. He’s the perfect storm of nature vs nurture. Neither of those things helped in raising a stable teenage boy, so he went ahead and cracked. And became obsessed with a teenage girl who didn’t care about him that much. What a mess! 

In this installment I was just fully rooting for Tress while screaming at every chance: GET MEDICAL ATTENTION. My poor girl had an infection that had made it to her blood that had her with a fever, hallucinations, and a sense that she was surely to die. Wow! I mean talk about karma for entombing your ex best friend 💀 Still, I’m glad she got to learn the truth about what happened to her parents and why she’s had so many close calls with death. 

Speaking of what happened to Tress’ parents, I’m so happy we had all (most?) of our loose ends tied! It all made sense. It was all revealed and left me 😱 None of it really felt like it came from nowhere (which I appreciate!) but it was absolutely BONKERS. I was truly left speechless. 

I don’t really know what else to say without spoiling the events of this novel. Just know I really loved this duology because I summarized the plot of book one to one friend, and I summarized book one and two to another friend because I needed someone else to be as speechless as I was 😂✨