This is a beautiful and heartbreaking little book about grief and trauma and love and my favorite trope of all: found family. I don't know how to describe the ways in which it moved me without just telling the entire story, because it felt like every part of it was moving, and it made me feel vulnerable in ways I wasn't expecting. I think one of the things that's special about this book is how it forces a confrontation of grief by physically manifesting the psychological aspects of trauma—by turning the metaphorical ghosts of its characters' pasts into literal real ghosts, by having its characters relive flashbacks so deeply that they leave tangible evidence behind, etc. The other special thing about this book is the pure, consuming, unconditional love that so thoroughly saturates it. It hurts and haunts and heals all at once.
A handful of other things that I really enjoyed about this book:
~the setting, which is an isolated farm on the coast near Mendocino, and is, thus, an environment with which I am immensely familiar and within which I feel more at home than anywhere else
~the casual diversity, which is understated in a way that feels very natural and accepting, emphasizing that the characters' genders and ethnicities and sexualities are inconsequential within the context of this story
~the hints towards... let's say the /potential/ for a (beautifully loving and healthy and supportive) polyamorous relationship that I'm choosing to believe does indeed form after the story ends
A handful of other things that I really enjoyed about this book:
~the setting, which is an isolated farm on the coast near Mendocino, and is, thus, an environment with which I am immensely familiar and within which I feel more at home than anywhere else
~the casual diversity, which is understated in a way that feels very natural and accepting, emphasizing that the characters' genders and ethnicities and sexualities are inconsequential within the context of this story
~the hints towards... let's say the /potential/ for a (beautifully loving and healthy and supportive) polyamorous relationship that I'm choosing to believe does indeed form after the story ends