Antonia Angress I was unfamiliar with your game. I did not expect to fall head over heels in love with this book. Angress' style of writing has this quiet, graceful quality to it that imbued the novel with a distant sense of longing. It permeates every page, informs every choice each character makes, and, ultimately, it makes the reader yearn for a deeper sense of connection, too.

Above all, to me Sirens & Muses is about love in its many forms and how we keep ourselves at a distance from it out of fear and insecurity. How we hold ourselves apart from true connection by utilizing insincerity as a defense mechanism is a central theme. In an early chapter of the book, one of our more tenderhearted main characters, Louisa, contemplates this:

"She didn't see why sincerity and fervor were so laughable."

And later we see it grating on her once again:

"Why were people at this school so averse to sincerity? Why did everything have to be coated in ten layers of irony?"

All of Angress' four main characters struggle with this in some way: insincerity, distance, fear—these feelings hold them apart from others and prevent them from achieving the connections they all so desperately desire. It was incredible to watch this story play out, to watch them all attempt to overcome this with varying levels of success—and, ultimately, I came to love reading from the perspectives of each character, watching their lives ebb in and out of each other's.

Karina and Louisa's romance was a highlight. Angress writes them with so much tenderness that it hurt to read about them misunderstanding each other, losing each other, arguing with each other—but it was all the more brilliant when they came back together again and we got incredible moments like this:

"What are you worrying about?" Louisa said after some time.
"What?"
"You bite your lip when you're worried. What are you worried about?"
It emerged from Karina without forethought: "That we don't understand each other."
Louisa put her pencil down. She tipped her head, smiling slightly. "What do you think it is I'm trying to do here?"

Once they finally shed the layers of their own insecurity and took the leap to speak openly and honestly with each other, a true connection was forged. Not a bond built solely on desire, but also on intimacy and trust.

I was surprisingly invested in Robert's development as well—I disliked Preston at the start (and, although I still dislike him as a person, I really loved his character by the end of the book), but I despised Robert: his insincerity, his startling lack of accountability, his unwillingness to commit to anything. Watching him as he was forced into a job that he thought himself too good for, only to find genuine happiness and connection in his bond with Adrian, was deeply moving. I think there's just something about found family that will always speak to me.

This isn't to say that I think he's completely fixed—he's complicated, just like everyone in this novel, but the fact that he was actually acknowledging what happened with Vince and attempting to own up to his failings rather than run away from them again spoke volumes about the shift in his priorities and mindset.

As for Preston: I... don't know what to say. Out of all of the characters in this novel, he is the least sympathetic to me, but Angress' writing did inevitably force me to empathize with him, to try to understand him. I don't like him, but I like the complexity of his existence, the questions it forces us to ask, not just about what art is, but about what weare: Why make art? Why create, why seek out connection?