I took a few months reading this on and off. It worked well for this book. It’s set in Britain in the late 1800s and the MC lives several different lives in 5 or 6 years. Sometimes her life changes so drastically that it feels like a different book. She is a mess and I am obsessed with her story. Also! Especially for being written in 1998, I feel like there’s good stuff in here about performing gender, done especially purposefully because of the book’s setting in the late 1800s, when clothes were very gendered. It’s done explicitly when the MC is a stage performer and later living as a boy, and more subtlely when she has ~feelings~ about seeing an old dress of hers.