I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks, Netgalley!

I am as picky a reader as I am voracious--it's rare that I give a book a full 5 stars, and even rarer that I find myself lacking even one tiny thing I wish had been different about the book. This is one of those rare cases. Not only did I absolutely love this book, but I'm pleasantly surprised at how many things I loved about it.

I loved the parallels to Antigone, my favorite of the Greek plays and one of my favorite characters. I loved the shoutouts to Diana Wynne Jones and Howl's Moving Castle, my all-time favorite book. I loved the beautiful snippets of poetry, the way they were used in communication, the amateur astronomy (another one of my favorite things), the fact that it was set in Athens... Okay. True. On the face of it, a lot of why I loved this book is because it dealt, delightfully, with nearly all of my favorite things.

But I also loved the book and respected the author tremendously for the way that it deals with extremely delicate subject matter. My heart broke over and over again for Andria, her loss, her epilepsy, her blessedly overbearing mother. (Epilepsy or no, if my mother had packed healthy snacks for a sleepover for me at any age, I would have sunk into the earth in mortification and rage.) The author tackled difficult subjects with grace and kindness, making them all the more poignant. Much as I love to read, I generally read as an escape and don't often get deeply emotionally invested, but here I really, really was. I cheered for them, hoped they would find their resolutions, even cried a little for them. This may be one of the most surprising gems I read this year.