(I somehow picked this up for 2024 Hugo reading, despite it not being genre fiction and not being published in 2024? I guess maybe the Canadian edition came out this year?)

Anyway, it was fine. Certainly a page turner, as I ripped through to find out the answers to the mystery in the set up. In the end, I'm not sure that it came together, or that the pay off to the mysteries made a lot of sense, though I did like a lot of parts of the whole.

The story follows a woman in her late twenties, who has been at loose ends for some time, trying to figure out why her sister committed suicide. Also, every single person in the family is terrible at communicating, so she travels all over the world to find out information her mother could've explained in about a minute and a half. I do know people who are that bad at talking to each other, but it still felt like the revelations happened at the speed of plot, not in a way that made organic sense for the characters. Which was the part I found really frustrating: we have the structure of the seven skins, each section of the book tying in with a discovery and a myth. However, like a "Five Times" fic where the author only really had three and a half ideas, it felt like a lot of padding here and there to make the numbers happen. And I'd have liked the book more if there'd been about a hundred pages less of it.

There was a lot of really beautiful imagery, and I loved the friendships and relationships between the female characters. The idea of reclaiming selkie stories from a more feminist angle should've worked better than it did, but ended up feeling tacked on, and as though tying in the stories made the author reach a little too far.