(This won the first Carol Shields Prize, which goes to American and Canadian fiction by female and non-binary authors. You can see I finally managed to read the first winner after they announced the second winner. I'm very on top of my award reading!)

Follows the youngest of three sisters (who may not be entirely a girl) after they're orphaned then taken in by their uncle. "Taken in" used very loosely here, as he's on the make, sets the siblings up in an empty apartment, and then largely forgets they exist, except when he wants to lay down the law and/or yell at them. I liked the siblings and the relationship between them, how each had their own perspective on the best way to survive and make the best out of their situation, and there's a great 1990s vibe to a lot of it. However, the book felt Dickensian in how poorly they were treated/couldn't catch a break, and it was a little over the top in places, to the point where I think a lot of it was allegorical?

Mostly I didn't vibe with the writing style, which tended to breathy and repetitive steam of consciousness, and I'm not entirely convinced anyone talks like that, even inside their own head. It's a 300+ page book, but the audiobook was five and a half hours (a little over half of what you'd expect), so I'm guessing there's a lot of stylistic white space in the print version. Maybe that would've been better, though I did like the narrators.