She did not trigger warning everything, here are some of the many many things she missed: there's chile rape, grooming(sexual, etc), child death/child murder, child sodomy, transphobia, homophobia, racism, incest involving a child, Gangrape(six people on one), trans villain trope, the gay people and trans people = pedophiles trope, forced family murder, and a whole lot of mental rep gone wrong. A lot of these things involve kids, because why the fuck not?

I need to repeat: violently transphobic content.

The location of this place is named Dementia. Yes. You read that right. Great start.

Introducing the following characters: Scarlet(child) and Violet(mother).
Since when is this Pokemon? This is the worst version of Pokemon naming I've seen because they change their names into even stupider ones. See, *1.

The OCD -like everything else here- is portrayed as extremely offensive, much like the DID, our OCD rep became so maddened by her OCD that she sodomized her child with objects and killed them via that process. WHAT?! OCD isn't- fuck off. Someone doesn't know what OCD is!

I'm not exempt, when I was like sixteen I wrote a DID/MPD character in a fanfiction who had many alters and a core. But what I didn't know as a child, this author should have known this. When I hopped online and asked people I found out wonderful and horrifying things. Did you know alters can just die off? Alters can completely take over and replace people. The core can vanish entirely. The core can fracture so much it's entirely lost. They don't know who is the real them. That split-identity and MPD is now outdated and wrong to use? There's a lot you could learn from just asking people with DID. Find a group of people with it and talk to them!

That character has advanced so much since I was a child, yet Brandi is a full-grown adult writing this garbage. This book is annoying.

DID is rarely violent, and very rarely are they this Criminal Minds meets Law and Order hacker intelligent alter taking hold and building an evil lair. His alternate personality is some kind of Jimmy Neutron boy genius? Why? Because that's the DID stereotype! And Brandi is keeping it all alive!

Some weird sentences that stood out to me:

"The flesh plastered across-" excuse me, plastered?

"A child-like lisp." Mmm, no thank you.

"His eyes are a universal blessing to this world."

The "this is insane" followed by them saying something along the lines of "isn't that offensive to say inside of a mental asylum".

"Do you want to know what my tongue feels like close to your ear?"

"He flips his hot tongue close to my ear lobe." I'm so tired.

*1: The scene where she opens about her backstory and went to get blueberries to make her sister a pie and came back to her sister hanging from the roof(which was just more shock factor). So she sets everything on fire. Aight.

"Your time is up, you didn't get the core personality from-" DID isn't like this!

I'm tired of people thinking these dark dystopian books need to be romance books. Or need mental illness or trans badly portrayed. Or rape scenes galore! "A dark dystopian" doesn't need to have a romance or child prostitution fixated upon. It can just have it implied, but the romance is a fixation. The eating disorders are a fixation. Gross. Just because it's a dark romance, a dark fantasy, a dark dystopian, does not mean you can inject it with a terrible stereotype mess, and offensive content. The dystopian can be progressive and better than this! If you're reading this, writers, please build up not down in your writing!

I'm not a big fan of things where characters have multiple code names or it's not really explained, especially when some have names that are already weird and wonky. Like Niles = Cupid is such a jump in the name situation.

Oh. Also. A lot of random Christianity is shoved into this story, but it doesn't really have a place or a reason to exist. Like of all the stuff to fixate on with a bunch of people trapped in a mental asylum. Everyone in the mental asylum is also either a CSA, SA, or prostitution survivor and that's so bad. Like CSA people are a varied group, but this portrayal is so stereotyped it hurts me!

Also, also, on top of everything else: this book had no stakes!
Turns out he could leave whenever he wanted to! No. Stakes!

0.5 stars.

Didn't even have a plot among the garbage content to keep it going. ( )

So I almost don’t want to leave a review cause so many summed it up so perfectly but HERE WE GO. I read a lot about dark topics so the trigger warnings didn’t bother me except the fact that she left a ton out which isn’t okay. The transphobia??? Not okay at all. It’s like she wrote a book just to be shocking. All that aside, this book makes no sense??? The world building is so convoluted and what time period is it even?? LAST THING, there is absolutely no spice. ( )