*I received an eARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.*

I’d previously read The Scapegracers and well I hadn’t loved the execution and I really liked the idea so when I saw Clarke was publishing a lesbian revenge story featuring a chronically, ill, main character and dystopian workers’ revolution, I was intrigued. I absolutely adore industrial fantasies and this cover is incredible so I went in with pretty high hopes. And I left with very mixed feelings.

This is not an easy book. It’s ambitious and visceral and thematically so rich. But the writing is a choice. We’re pretty much solely in the head of Marney Honeycutt, who is chronically ill from exposure to an element that her and her entire family spent their lives mining. So the writing becomes almost fever dream like and there’s these lush descriptions that make you feel like you’re also getting ill from exposure to this element. Clark doesn’t hold your hand at all, except they kind of do because there are these info dumps on the world that never fully came together for me. And then because we’re in Marney’s head there’s this distance to the rest of the story that had me struggling to wanna pick it up if I wasn’t actively reading it.

I feel like I haven’t really had many positive things to say and that’s not true. Well, this book didn’t fully come together for me. I do think it’s something that’s gonna stick with me for a while, and I applaud Clarke’s ambition. This truly feels like a book he needed to write and I hope that it gets the audience it deserves, though I fear that in an era of cozy fantasy and romantasy it’s going to fall under the radar. I think this is going to be divisive because of the writing and I think if you pick it up, you’ll know within a few pages if it’s a book for you or not.