Excellent, heartbreaking. Clunky in places, especially on meditations of privilege, which were both necessary and fell flat in a book about oppression centering white characters; nothing to be done about that. There was also a point in the first half where I was tempted to DNF for the same reasons I DNF'd Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations near the 30% mark: The prose was so sedately pushing nothing along and so deeply melancholy that I no longer felt I was gleaning a terrific amount from the reading experience except a resurgence of clinical depression. But every time I thought about bailing, the story moved just enough and interestingly enough to pull me back in. This wound up being a book I deeply loved, a 4.5 despite its flaws. It is about grief in the front half and healing in the back half, and I think it was a fucking spectacular debut. Really excited to read from this author again.