It’s taken me a couple days to gather my thoughts on this.L because there’s a lot going on in this book. It’s a snapshot that becomes a portrait that becomes something even more intricate, of a small town as a few characters—all of whom are bound together by their childhood and high school days—return to it, for one reason or another.

At first blush it appears to be tapping into the culture and verisimilitude of high school in particular, as the characters are thrust back in time, with only the reader, I think, being really aware of these interceptions of memory taking place. It provides context and deeper meaning to the meaning of coming back home and how pivitol, formative moments led them to act and Be who they are now, and what they’re doing. The patterns they are bucking against as they encounter the ghosts of their former selves seems to be the main point.

As each character has their storyline and the tapestry comes together though, a major subplot that could have been the entire plot of a different kind of novel emerges organically. Only the reader can connect these dots; the cast, as in their adolescence are on rails crafted by childhood circumstances and the cultural mythos of the times, their galvanizing generational moment steeped very specifically in 9/11, all thematically convey a wonderfully, if heartbreaking, portrait of these people.

This transition into rumination on so many large things, without being preachy or heavy handed in the least, makes this a great book. Like all great fiction it becomes about everything. And again, like most great fiction, the characters are vibrantly human in their contradictions. Many of which only work because of this gradual and deep, nuanced look at their lives. It does not demonize truly horrible acts and does not shy away from the insurmountable damage people visit in each other in casual ways, especially as a teenager. Because it’s about trauma in no small way, it requires this degree of granularity to it, or else it would not be doing the subjects any justice.

Many books would have stopped short and given various motivations for actions and deeds, and also probably delivered some kind of catharsis. I think part of why this packs such a punch though, is that it is willing to say something more rather than breaching the subject and using wind up toy motivations like so many other books that want to only peripherally be about these things. Part of why some people (I count myself as one of them) have felt so unmoored and disconnected from people in an age of post globalization and should be pronounced connectivity, lays in issues this book interrogates. The feeling of people who went through this time, I think, is tremendously well captured here; In a way I don’t think I’ve yet read.

The prose work is also fantastic for almost all of it. One section, and this is why it took me a while to deliberate on my ranking and thoughts, somewhat loses the specificity of the starting chapters. Taking place through the eyes of a kid who grows up to go to the war in Afghanistan. I think maybe the idea of styling that experience as with the rest of the book might have been slightly disrespectful—or, perhaps, the experience is also probably ineffable for a reader like me, who has never had any experiences remotely like that. I know when I watch and read war as a genre, I do not connect to it at all. I know what I think about war and don’t need an empathy exercise in it, because, again, it’s not really something I can imagine, even when they are stylized or literalized in from of my eyes. There’s no comparable feeling I’ve ever had that I could use to someone who is blown apart or suffering PTSD, or in an active combat situation.

So, in the end I’m giving this top marks because I don’t think that section is, as I first thought, less well written then the rest. It thematically ties in well and I think is quite substantive. And the ending was just absolutely stunning, for me. The first half is like the dense anxiety of watching the TV show Euphoria and the second half transforms it into something even more holistic.