A review by mygeekblasphemy
A History of Glitter and Blood by Hannah Moskowitz

4.0

This is probably one of the most intentionally messiest books I’ve ever read. That’s not always my thing, but I liked this one. By the end, it all kind of brilliantly works together. It’s also very funny, although its sense of humor is uniquely macabre and has a lot to do with eating fairies alive, so, probably know if you’re into that kind of thing or not before you pick up this one. (I am, clearly, because I'm terrible.) The fairies, BTW, are fascinating, just, like, the biology of them. And actually, this book gets into some really interesting commentary about genetics and racism and how every side has a different history. You think ‘war book’ and you probably think a lot of battles and fight scenes (or maybe I just do), which this doesn’t really have. But A History of Glitter and Blood is very much a book about war, and it does a really good job examining how people act in war, what excuses they use to start one in the first place, how daily atrocities can just become your way of life, so much so you don’t even think of them as all that bad, etc. (Well, that last came before the war, but anyway.) It’s also a love story, and I find that I definitely ship Beckan/Scrap. Scrap is kind of my favorite. Beckan is a pretty great heroine (although sometimes her contradictory thoughts about certain subjects drive me a little nuts), but I fell for Scrap pretty much instantly.

A History of Glitter and Blood is a hard book to review with any real sense of coherence, but I didn’t find the book particularly hard to read. There were definitely times I wished for a bit more structure separating the past and present, and the intrusive narrator threw me for a loop for a while, but the more you read, the more it all seemed to work. I’d recommend this, so long as the person I was recommending it to was open to some serious narrative and structural weirdness.