When her boyfriend Dev Patil — who can magically foresee threats — tells her of upcoming dangers, they flee the city together, and their lives become much more complicated.
[1] Kirkus Reviews praised it as a "nuanced portrait of racism in all of its poisonous flavors" which explores "the incredibly fraught, liminal space of being a light-skinned person of color", extolling Johnson's "musical prose" and "passionate and painful depictions of the love expressed in romance and friendship ".
[2] Publishers Weekly found it to "challenging [and] diverse", and a "literary firecracker" with "dynamic characters" and "style to spare", but faulted the plot as "overstuffed".
"[4] Tor.com observed Johnson's choice to forego a "three-act narrative arc" despite having three viewpoint characters (including Tamara, who Phyllis and Dev meet later), noting that "what readers will anticipate is the crux of the story — Phyllis' relationship not only with her mob boss but with Dev" is in fact resolved at the end of the first part, with the rest of the novel being "all consequence and fallout, echoing with the reverberations of trauma".
[5] FIYAH considered it a "wonderfully rich blend of a vividly dangerous world, laced with magic in a vibrant presentation of historical reality", with "lyrical writing" and "characters [who] feel real and almost lovable", and recommended it to those who seek "heavily character-driven narrative laced with mysticism", but also described it as "imbalanced", with the viewpoints of Phyllis, Dev, and Tamara "not having the same effect throughout".