I sunk slowly into this book, the first story was grating in the way that you are trying to find your bearings in any new book. By the time I got used to it, I was hooked. It helped that I went back to read the blurb which I generally try to do to avoid having too much knowledge of what might happen. This one needed a blurb read to better understand the author's writing from her cultural histories, finding her place within two Indigenous cultures. 
I felt a connection back to where I grew up, I found words that I hadn't heard since I was taught them in primary school, and I found stories that had cultivated my love of reading. It was a beautiful experience. Many of the stories were challenging to read as they depicted the histories of white colonisation of two separate cultures that were inhumanly wrecked by white people. Which is important to be educated on and the author did an incredible job of this, using lyrical, deeply human, depictions of the loss they experienced. I was able to feel what was being described and it hurt.