Finally, I went into the book having read the blurb so I knew what I was getting into! Unfortunately, the blurb seems to have been written for a different book than the one I read. Maybe the author didn’t get any say in it? Who knows.
This is essentially three different books. In the first, we follow a woman named Boy as she escapes her abusive father and makes a new life for herself in Flax Hill, settling for safety and security over anything that she has any real love for and deciding that this is the way it should be. In the second we follow Bird, who is Boy’s biological daughter as we encounter themes of race and watch as she communicates with the sister that Boy sent away before meeting her and coming to understand why her mother distrusts her even if she’s not sure it’s fair. Finally, the third has us snap back to Boy as she discovers that her father is a traumatized transman and biologically her mother and then decides to bring both of the girls with her on a quest to detransition her father and the story stops before anything more happens.
It’s an incredibly meandering read. Though I found Boy interesting, she doesn’t want anything and this is very much a book where things happen more than a story is told. There’s very little chemistry between characters, and I’m not sure if the flat characterization of so many of the characters is a result of Boy’s indifference to everything or if the depth just wasn’t there.
Also that last part. The book really does stop rather than end, and the last third really does come completely out of nowhere. It’s a very sour end to a dull read. I don’t typically spoil stories like this, or I try not to, but in this instance I think it’s necessary for readers to know what’s coming there.
Overall, I was definitely not the audience for this one. I think it’s literary fiction, which is likely a better fit for someone else.