TL;DR: Aged 18: Deicide Becomes a Crack Head. The End.

TL;DR: this should be titled: “Aged 18: Deicide Becomes a Crack Head” because that’s all that happens in this novella.

If, like me, you were hoping, finally, for a departure from the childish stream of consciousness that has been the format of Deicide’s childhood and teen years.

“What’s your story?”
Deicide: My story? I don’t have a story. What’s that mean?
Sigh. She’s 18, apparently went to school, had ‘friends’ there, but the author is still writing her stream of consciousness like she’s been locked in a basement her whole life. We’re supposed to believe she’s never come across concepts like stripping, cocaine, drug dealers, BSDM.

“He’s married? Then why’s he here with me?” He’s literally paying you for sex work. That’s why he’s there. I almost strained my eyes from rolling them so hard every time she was so stupidly naive about everything. Which was a lot, because her inner monologue questioned literally everything anyone said or did the moment after they said and did it.

I don’t buy Deicide’s whole baby thing. Suddenly she’s supposed to WANT a child? This was so out of left field, even in the last book. She was forced to birth a baby and drugged during the whole pregnancy. If there were any times she actually connected with fetus during the pregnancy, the author didn’t bother to show us. It’s still all telling, and still in the most annoying stream of childish consciousness.

Another example of her apparently naivety: her father leaves her a cryptic message and somehow she doesn’t understand it? After all the training in bullshit she had in previous books?

Another example: she lets a complete stranger follow her into her house and does nothing. It’s okay though, he’s the local drug dealer and can he give her a lift to her next errand. “Well I guess he’s not really a stranger,” she justifies to herself like two seconds after meeting him.

The author has commented on how excited she is to write an older Deicide, but I don’t know what she is excited about - there’s no hint of Deicide the Adult being any different to Child Deicide. They have exactly the same stream of consciousness. She’s not dealing with trauma. She has no agency at all. She’s not becoming independent. At every moment she depends on her brothers, her drug dealer, her coworkers. They provide her with every opportunity. While she has started thinking “I can take care of myself. They should be afraid of ME”, but does literally nothing to show either herself or us why she would think that torturing helpless people somehow equips her to handle an attacker. This could have been something the author very easily SHOWED us - have some random goons attack Deicide and show us how her knowledge of anatomy and knives equips her to ruthlessly and messily fuck them up. But no, there is nothing like that.

Disappointing and I probably won’t bother with the rest of the series.

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