This is a whirlwind of a book, and it caught me up completely. I could not put it down. Devoured it fast. It got me to care about Bri immediately, so deeply wrapped up in her world and the intensity of the story. It gutted me in a glorious way, resonated at a frequency that felt exactly right, and just kept surprising me in the ways that it would turn. 
 The writing is gorgeous. It grips you and doesn't let you go. Beautiful metaphors. Tremendously strong voice. 
 This is not a light book; it's set in a violent world, it's full of teeth and claws and intensity, and it did not let me go. It's also some of the hottest sex I have ever read on the page; it felt raw and ferocious and matched the whirlwind nature of the book itself. 
 This book is very much about Bri's struggle not to re-enact her abusive family systems and her fear that she is, and those stories are precious, especially when done this well, with this much care and love and insistence on it not being easy or simple or impossible. I hold this story close to my heart for how it grapples with this complex struggle. 
 So often, in stories about girls like Bri, tough ferocious trauma survivors who are scared and brave in equal measures, who own their desire, there is a framework that is both anti-sex and full of misogyny, a tone of pity, or explanation, or a hurling towards doom about them, this distance and grief for the character, like you are supposed to be titillated by proximity but not identify with them, be several steps away watching, even when it's told in the first person. This story demolished those tropes, in an unforgiving way, was intensely, relentlessly centered on Bri with no distance at all, and a tremendous amount of respect and love for her and who she is, how she thinks, what she needs, and what she chooses and for that alone this book has won my fervent devotion. 
 Let me say that again more bluntly, in case it was not clear. This book centers a tough, ferocious sexual woman who is a trauma survivor, and it wasn't about looking at her from the outside or getting titillated. It insisted on centering her perspective. 
 And it was hopeful. She wasn't doomed. She didn't need to "learn a lesson," or get punished or be fixed. I cannot tell you how much I needed this story. I'm not sure I knew until I was done reading it and it had started to sink in. It is a tremendous gift to me as a survivor. 
 Trigger Warnings: (view spoiler)[ There are references to child physical abuse throughout. There is a description of child sexual abuse in the first chapter. There is a mugging early in the book that includes substantial physical violence. There is a violent attack in the middle of the book that results in a broken arm that's described in detail, as is the home medicine used to set the injury. There is an attack later in the book that is very violent. References to sexual coercion. Descriptions of being homeless and precariously housed. Physical fights both in the boxing ring and out of it. References to being a child witness of intimate partner violence and coerced sex work. A lot of alcohol use. Brief fatphobic comment that is challenged by another character. (hide spoiler)]