Emezi never misses. This book was so fantastic. It is a prequel to their highly successful novella “Pet” which I also read and loved. I think I’m inadvertently comparing Bitter to Pet in this rating and I just happened to like Pet more, but both are truly incredible. I have never read such imaginative world-building that is so real life-adjacent but a reimagined utopian version of life as we know it. If you need hope about the state of the work at the moment, pick this one up.