[5] Kirkus Reviews observed that Kwon's style may be divisive but nonetheless remarked that the "bold, tough novel ... invites the viewer’s gaze and stares defiantly back.

"[7] Just as with The Incendiaries, critics observed the variety of issues which Kwon tackled in her second novel, including but not limited to, according to Los Angeles Review of Books, "queerness, racial identity, aesthetic vocation, domestic violence, childbearing, and parental aging" and, fundamentally, "religion, its inexplicability.

"[12] Some noted the rapport between the two novels, with the Chicago Review of Books finding them mutually "concerned with art and faith, love and devotion, restraint and liberation.

[1][15][16] With the erotic being a strong concentration of the novel, Kwon drew upon her own observations of desire, ranging from the artistic to the "queer and kinky": "A lot of the highly ambitious women I know and love feel a great deal of pressure to hide that ambition.

"[12][1] In the years leading up to the novel's release, including promotional cycles for The Incendiaries and Kink, Kwon was vocal in several pieces about her personal history with Korean Catholicism, her identity as a queer woman, and the struggle as a result of her conflict between self and family.