Wow, this novel went some PLACES I was not expecting. It had all the trappings of a teen drama - cliques! Queen bees! Sneaky love notes! - but seen through the eyes of a tired alcoholic adult with a lot of baggage. Also, take all of those tropes, but add on a heaping dose of realistic MAGIC. I appreciated that it was far less twee than a certain very famous book about teens at magic school, because let's be real, magic graffiti of dicks is way more mundane.
The body horror was perhaps what really set this one as very, very separate from most teen-centric novels. Some of the aforementioned teen drama gets GORY.
I generally don't care for first-person narrative, but it worked well here, especially with the PI slant. Ivy was an interesting, broken protagonist, which made the end all that more bittersweet. I did sometimes find her decisions... a bit pathetic, but she had a lot of unhealthy coping mechanisms that she had developed over the years, so it's not surprising.
Also, tiny aside - LGBTQ representation treated as a normal and unremarkable thing is always appreciated. I'm remarking on it happily.
The body horror was perhaps what really set this one as very, very separate from most teen-centric novels. Some of the aforementioned teen drama gets GORY.
I generally don't care for first-person narrative, but it worked well here, especially with the PI slant. Ivy was an interesting, broken protagonist, which made the end all that more bittersweet. I did sometimes find her decisions... a bit pathetic, but she had a lot of unhealthy coping mechanisms that she had developed over the years, so it's not surprising.
Also, tiny aside - LGBTQ representation treated as a normal and unremarkable thing is always appreciated. I'm remarking on it happily.