Kiste writes well, especially when describing the Rust Maidens’ uncanny physical transformations and the guilt-ridden inner turmoil of the protagonist. (I never quite believed she was a woman in her forties, but that may have been intentional, a depiction of arrested development due to her teenage trauma.) I sometimes felt impatient for the protagonist to actually do something to move the plot rather than mostly angsting at it, but that may be my flaw, not the book’s.