I loved this book! I thought it was creepy and very well written for a debut novel. I commend the book for changing my mindset from “hate to love” to pure love. Honestly, I’ve always enjoyed villains, so I was anticipating liking Em as a character regardless, but it does set you up to hate her for what she does to Gyre. But they have wonderful qualities too: vivacity, intelligence, loyalty. They have flaws, they make mistakes (Em, obviously, given her very grey morals, but Gyre isn’t perfect either: I was literally yelling at her for something she did at the end of the book). They both feel like fully fleshed out characters. The women in this book, Gyre and Em are wonderful. Gyre needs Em to keep her alive, literally, and Em needs Gyre to keep her from being a monster. Part of me wonders if maybe they feel a little too strongly about each other by the end of the novel, but part of me thinks they’re justified in falling fast and hard: the two of them are clinging to each other through a very traumatic experience. Getting there is an interesting process, given that Em drugs and controls Gyre without her consent. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that they end up together (in her interview, Caitlin Starling markets it as “angry, traumatized lesbians in caves.”). The relationship between Gyre and Em is fascinating to watch as it develops over the course of the book. I am an absolute sucker for a good enemies-to-lovers to story. Jensen Liao, Yao Hanmei, Halian Foster, and so on. I will add that there was also diversity in the few background characters, the cavers that came before Gyre.

I was disappointed with Gyre’s lack of physical description overall, but I can understand the reason for that. When she describes her own mother to Em, she says her mother looked just like she does, with “light brown skin, freckles, red hair.” If Caitlin Starling intended her to be Afro-Latina like Tessa Thompson, she could have clearly shown that, instead of giving the reader leeway to read her as a very tan redhead. When we first see her via camera, she is described as a “dark-skinned, very tired woman” with “thick, pure black hair, haloing around her face in a mess of tight curls.” We also see videos of her parents, a man “with a rich, lilting accent nearly black skin” and a woman who is “pale-skinned her blond hair curling gently against her cheeks.” Gyre is more ambiguous. Em, at least, is explicitly portrayed as mixed race.

I was worried it would be left up to the reader’s interpretation. In last month’s post, I mentioned my concern about how race would be handled within the book.

The luminous dead book