🎀Vulnerable and out of job and money, Gia agrees to an arrangement with Nathan, whom she met on a sugar dating website. He will financially support her if she agrees to play the part of his pet. Due to her severe OCD, an offer such as this with clear rules and boundaries seems like the perfect bargain for Gia. As she starts this new life in a cage, she comes to realize quickly that some boundaries were feeble from the start and will have to be reclaimed with claws and teeth.🎀 The cover, the premise mixed with the aesthetics and the promise of themes of female rage lured me in and I adored the prologue! It set the tone beautifully and I was blown away by Ballard's writing style in the first few pages. Unfortunately, that tone broke off almost immediately, following a hundred pages of rambling and plot details that have little relevance for the rest of the book. The depiction of OCD isn't the worst, but isn't very good either. It almost feels like the author threw us this umbrella term to blur over how incohesive the symptoms are shown at time. The portrayal fails to exemplify the far reaching consequences of a 'severe case' (author's wording) and seems even out of place and insensitive at times, making it seem like the author wants to sell us Gia as 'quirky'. Furthermore, our main character is inconsistent in a lot of scenes, mulling over her words and worrying about her tone and image for paragraphs before blurting out in a rude manner for the next few. Although I feel I would have liked to find out more about Nathan's backstory and motivations, you could make sense of his rather flat character by saying that a feminist narrative like this doesn't want to distinguish its perpetrator as any more than that. I'm good with that answer, still the writing's lacking agency is making me doubt any intention I'm trying to read into it. The more the book went on, the more I got annoyed by the author's writing style. When first I thought her similies were clever, at the 50% mark 'like' and 'as if' were flooding the pages and distracting my reading-flow. In the very last parts up until the ending, the development of our main character suddenly took on a more metaphorical/surreal manner, which was interesting in itself to read, but didn't fit into the rest of the book at all. Such a 'switch' (trying not to spoil) should have been introduced or hinted at a lot earlier for its meaning to truly deliver instead of bewilder. Lots of loose ends don't get tied up and a lot of stuff just doesn't seem to make sense. Sadly, a quite unsatisfying ending that could have worked under different circumstances. All in all, with the various formatting errors (which I thought were intentional at first, like maybe a hint at our MC's foundations and borders crackling? - at least when I still believed the writing could be coherent) this book could have been so much more if edited properly. I give it 1 star, since the idea is great, but the execution was severely lacking. I did like the gore, but I feel like it added little to the story's purpose other than shock value. If people like this book, it will probably be for the vibes (Tropes) and the shocking scenes. However, don't expect it to cover the intricacies of female rage, power dynamics and mental illness well.