There are triggering aspects about this novella including but not limited to:
- sexual harrassment, and (half-failed) dealing with said harrassment
- male entitlement bordering on SA and collective punitive victim-blaming
- cast system and slavery, possible trafficking element
- grief and mourning, recent death, trauma etc.
The prose of the novella was quite lyrical at times, written in a mature manner. There's discussion of neurodifference and discussion of grief and possibly trauma in this one. I enjoyed the epilogues as these were down-to-earth and balanced the novella out. I did love and enjoy the two main characters, Endzoh and Carrie. They were very decent and the dynamics in between felt healthy.
Having said that, these were just about all the things I liked in this book, most of the other things were a dissapointment. Out of all the rest, Darran's brothers choice of behaviour most certainly was the gravest of those things, as these particular raskarrans with their sullen sulking over the issue that they weren't getting their promised trophies in the form of mates and that they weren't allowed to continue harrassing ruined the novella for me.
For instance, for a lenghty while, the newly joined males were condemning and victim blaming the FML over the issue that she reported a harrasser! Not nearly enough was done by the other male raskarrans to handle them. The unfortunate underspinning unwritten rules of the society becomes evident when those raskarrans weren't cast out despite being menacing.
What's worse, the reponsibility of adult emotional damage control ended up being put exclusively on the shoulders of the human female characters who had to invent solutions to the collective male temper tantrums as those men didn't appear to get what they felt they should. And the peace offering scene. A victim expected to make amends! Just ew.
At least the MML states in the end that they had to learn that the sisters aren't objects, some prizes to be won. Yet the author was still majorly pushing her there-is-two-sides-to-everything bs narrative and the let's-be-understanding-if-we-ever-want-to-find-relationships-again. Implying and pushing the victim to be 'rational', let's not overreact etc etc when there was a clear entitlement-induced boundary violation. VOMIT.
I guess consent was aimed to be discussed about openly but the conclusions made were infuriating and out of place. The class inequality and slavery context of the female characters was also very uncomfortable to witness. Last but not least, taking into consideration said inequality, I really did not appreciate ripping and destroying one's mate's clothes in a fit of emotion by the MML, these things matter.