About midway through (before I'd spotted the work of classic literature it was riffing on), I said to a friend of mine that one way to think about this book was if you imagine that Farscape had been written by someone who just binge watched the entire run of Steven Universe. Neither of those shows were among the cultural touchstones mentioned in the afterword, but that characterization didn't feel any less accurate as I went on.

With Farscape, it shares a thematic fascination with breaking down the boundaries between its individual characters and the world around them: they're doubled, split, traumatized, mixed together, they eat and are eaten, their minds and bodies are leaky and permeable. And it takes that show's narrative tendency never to let a frying pan go by without a scarier fire prepped and waiting beyond. With Steven Universe, it shares an abiding faith in the ability of empathy and connection to make families out of people who began as enemies, and, eventually, for that process to topple tyrannies; a tendency to jewel tones; a heavy mix of high fantasy aesthetic in with its space opera.

I began this book entertained, and ended it pretty delighted.