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bluejayreads's review against another edition
I picked this up for concept - a vast demographic imbalance has left 40 million more men that women, so households with multiple husbands are legal - and was actually really excited about it. I did enjoy the idea, and the setting of dystopian near-future China. But the story is told from the perspectives of the woman, the potential new husband, and the two existing husbands, and each one manages to make the narrator sympathetic and the rest of the characters horrible. It's difficult to form any kind of opinion when the characters are shown in such different lights depending on who's narrating. The potential new husband is a hopeless romantic and gets upset when real people don't act out his fantasy, the woman is deeply unhappy because her husbands and child are not exactly how she wants them to be so they must be wrong and broken, one husband is obviously autistic and hated by his wife and treated horribly by everyone for it (as well as being considered disgusting because he's fat), and the other husband didn't get enough narration in the first 24% for me to get a sense of him and the other characters all view him vastly differently. Everyone is unhappy, they all hate each other, and despite a good idea and setting I really do not want to spend any more time with these characters.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content and Fatphobia
Moderate: Child abuse, Homophobia, and Ableism
Minor: Adult/minor relationship
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