Oh wow. It’s still early in the year, but I’m already certain this is going to be among my top books of 2025. It’s been such a simultaneously heartbreaking and heartmending experience. I had doubts early on about reading a whole novel in second person, but the author’s style absolutely drew me in. I felt for Will during every little step of their journey, and I’m so happy for the future they’ve won for themself—and also so sad the book is over. 

This is a beautiful and relatable exploration of the scars abuse leaves, and how one might go about healing them, and how the type of hypervigilance and self-reliance you develop in traumatic circumstances may sometimes do you a disservice in healthier situations. I loved how human all the characters are, and how they work through the mistakes some of them make. In that regard, the book really felt like a warm hug, subtly telling or rather showing you, “It’s okay to stumble. A mistake is not the end of the world.”

Every part of Will’s arc feels incredibly authentic, and as a whole the book does a great job painting what it’s like to start figuring out your own life once you’re out of an abusive situation. The instinctive mistrust toward everyone with enough power to influence the course of your existence, the shame-tinged joy of getting things for yourself, the slight unreality of it all, the slow, slow tempo of gradually beginning to relax around well-meaning people and letting them in. The fact that it can be easier to open up to someone new who you know shares specific aspects of your identity and history rather than to someone who’s been there all along, but there’s a gap in your life experiences. How everything is no longer that scary, and that alone is enough to cause stress. If I’m feeling nitpicky, I might say that maybe, just maybe, the way everything Will feared turned out to be the opposite of dangerous was a slight overkill. But damn it, we need optimistic stories, especially when they’re stories focused on young marginalized protagonists, and the book as a whole shows clearly that it made sense for Will to fear what might happen if

police got involved, the fact that it went okay was largely due to the present of other characters—adults willing to wield their privilege to shield them

.

All in all, it was lovely, and I loved everyone in the core cast, and I adore how diverse this book is, the gentle nb/nb love story aspect of it, and all the Dragon Age references.