Daisy Johnson weaves and twists together a modern myth about living on the edge of society. The story is broken in time between events when a mother, her daughter and a man lived together on a boat on the river, and the aftermath of this period where they all lost one another. The storytelling is crisp and flows well for most of the book.

The protagonists create language, and use it carefully, and at the end this seems the point of the book: that our world is built from the stories that we can create. Parts are a reimagining of Hansel and Gretel, but Everything Under is very much its own fairy tale.