I hated it so much that once everything was more or less revealed I decided to not put myself through finishing it.
Graphic: Trafficking, Medical trauma, Misogyny, Slavery, Violence, Animal cruelty, Rape, Medical content, Murder, Racism, Sexual violence, and Sexism
There is not one likable character except the poor woman who’s killed in the very beginning, her mother who graphically approaches death the entire novel, and the prostitute who really saved a protag’s ass as well as the plot only for him to ruin her entire life for no reason (the reason being, well, she was a prostitute). At one point I skipped ~120 pages bc I was so bored and pissed off, and as I kept going I realized I didn’t really miss anything. It was easy to go back and find anything if I did need to, bc I just looked for the dialogue, bc that was mainly when any action happened. There was SO much first-person inner monologue from these completely terrible, violent male protags. You could make a case for why the characters are the way they are, I suppose, and there were parts that I liked (and it was clearly well researched and well executed in that sense) but it definitely needed to be at LEAST two hundred pages shorter, and it is not worth sitting through all the awful things these characters do over the course of the book for the payoff at the end. I told my husband, the only way this book can turn itself around for me is if all of the men in this book die. Once most of the mystery was revealed and it became clear that was not how the book was going to end I put myself out of my misery. I only made it as far as I did bc it was a recommendation.