by Heather O'Neill, 2017 · 389 pages
This book reads like a dark fairy tale filtered through grime and glitter, with prose that turns poverty and desperation into strange, glittering imagery. The sentences have a fable-like cadence, full of startling metaphors, but the content underneath is raw and often brutal, creating a constant tension between beauty and despair. It moves briskly through decades, favoring vivid, almost hallucinatory scene-painting over slow interiority.
Literary fiction · melancholic · whimsical · gritty
Reading age: 18+ (adult)
Spice: 3 out of 5. some on-page sex, often tied to trauma or survival