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Marillier has described Stasya as a character she views as being on the autism spectrum, although the world of the novel doesn't have any language through which to identify her in those terms. This understanding gives particular weight to Stasya’s isolation and to the assumptions other people make about her. Her difference is never treated as a flaw awaiting correction.

At the heart of this story is Stasya, a young woman who stands apart from her village—not because she’s been banished, but simply because she doesn’t quite fit. She’s the sort who listens before speaking, walks the woods rather than gossiping at the local pub, and, perhaps most notably, understands animals in a way that unsettles her neighbours.

Keshe Chow’s For No Mortal Creature is a novel preoccupied with what lingers—after death, after love, after trust has already begun to fracture. It enters the crowded space of YA fantasy with familiar surface markers—an otherworldly realm, a central romance, a heroine navigating power she does not fully understand—but quickly reveals a more intricate interior, one shaped as much by grief as by spectacle.