How much is too much? And will it ever be enough? Can you love someone enough to save them from their own thoughts and actions? Can one human experience too much pain? These are some of the questions I have been left with after finishing this novel. It’s gut-wrenching and absolutely heartbreaking but it’s a novel despite how much I put it down because I was exhausted from the action unfolding, I found myself going back to it, always with the hope that things will be different now. There are a number of difficult and harrowing passages in the book, but there’s chapters of intimacy and such gentleness and care between the characters. You’ll grow it love all the characters and have frustration with them and their decisions. I commend Hanya for being able to write a novel that had be going back, despite how horrified I was by what was unfolding. I also wonder was all that necessary? If the book were 200 pages shorter and the events that take place less would this not have been an even more powerful book and not one that sometimes feels like “how much can I test the reader to stick with this until the end?”