What a hateful little book.

It's disappointing as Oloixarac writes beautifully. But the entire novel was nothing but derision; I can recall only one or two instances that weren't expressed as smug ridicule (as small as when the protagonist told another writer that she liked her poetry). The rest of it was all virulent contempt for anything and anyone other than describing her body parts in a way that was indistinguishable from a misogynist 1960s scifi writer. The protagonist is damaged by being othered but flippantly shits on gay men (no you don't get to call a gay man a fairy to be edgy and treat him as an accessory), Chinese people (who all look the same according to the protagonist) and fat people (which is written as a disgusting trait and a physical manifestation of a woman's coarse personality).

I have purposely been avoiding reading books by male authors, but this was completely saturated in posturing for the male gaze. It's supposed to be a polemic of sorts regarding

Spoiler

sex assault

but utterly fails in that regard. It's just so much contrived edginess for the sake of edginess that it washes away an important story, one that could have been a sincere and intelligible narrative. Giving it two stars instead of one for what almost was, I guess.