This book is really really dark and really really gory and also really really good despite (or perhaps because of) all that.

Nita is the narrator. She doesn't kill people or sell their body parts, but she does dissect the people her mother kills so her father can sell their body parts. A huge part of the emotional arc of the story is Nita insisting to herself that she's a good person, and then as things get worse and worse crossing her own lines and trying to reconcile the fact that she may not be that good after all. I don't read enough antiheroes to be able to positively identify her as one, but I know that despite all the bad things she does, I liked her a lot.

The story actually takes a little bit to get to the "Nita gets sold on the black market" part, but I was okay with that. It took time to set up a complicated dynamic between Nita and her mother, establish a world where nonhuman creatures are known and some of them are on a "legal to murder them" list, and tease a few things that get explained later on. And once it gets into the "Nita gets sold" part, wow, does it get intense.

This whole book is intense and vivid. Rebecca does an amazing job writing about pain - and there is a LOT of pain in this book. Torture, cutting off body parts, broken bones, stabbings ... Normally the amount of sheer violence in this book would put me off, but somehow I didn't mind (that much). It was intense, but it was also engrossing.

What I didn't realize when I picked this up is that it's first in a series. I'm actually not sure if I want to go on to the second book. There are some loose ends that weren't tied up and that's the only reason I'm considering reading book two - I really just wish everything had been resolved at the end of this one. It was really good, don't get me wrong, and I enjoyed it. I just don't know if I can handle another book as violent as this one. If I do, it'll be sometime in the future, not immediately.