This book gets more interesting for me the more I think on it. The ending is abrupt and initially unsatisfying, denying catharsis and is very prescriptive. But the more you interrogate it as a reader it becomes multifaceted.

A campus novel more concerned with creating the whirlwind rhythm of firsts. Friends, classes, ostensible crush or love or infatuations—paired with a writing style that focuses on descriptions of events, rarely granting much interiority or reflection, or sometimes even emotion. It then morphs into the first time away from that experience but rooted in a time and place similarly other, fish-out-water, communicatively dissociative. To give some further grounding to the fiction, I really enjoyed the “word ecosystem” created here—which feels very millennial to me—in which Selin consumes various media and books and reflects on them, which characterizes her, by proxy. And it also builds a shared consciousness with the reader where so much is missing in the description and granularity of the actual campus and other locations, but the associations Selin makes grow and add to the tone and atmosphere and the philosophy and psychology of Selin. Even as the character herself completely elides that this has happened across the entirety of the novel.

Wildly humorous to me at times, particularly around the arrangement of how something happens, rather than the event itself. Unafraid of poking fun at the protagonist, Selin, who fairly careens from life events to the next in a dream-like stupor, almost. It provokes the reader into a response and subjective reading, which isn’t typically how I like my fiction. The more context the better. But in this case it works well to convey the atmosphere and malleability of young Selin, who sometimes didn’t make sense to me at all. Only the changes in her opacity as a character somehow did define her by the end of it, especially when there’s stark contrasts. Simultaneously flighty prose that make the flow excellent, and the subject matter almost frivolous, become much more dense when you have to insert the context and the general meaning when your finished concludes.

Certainly unlike anything I’ve read. Completely subversive of genre expectations. Highly enjoyable and with a singular kind of humour. Possibly because of the subjectivity it’s hard to have a ”this-all-came-together” moment, because it’s almost self-generated value and therefor incredibly difficult to evaluate, even a day later and having slept on it and talked with my friend who read it with me, and without whom I would have struggled to take away meaning from certain moments. Sometimes we took away opposite meanings, even. Which I think is part of the charm and intention here. Even as I talk about it and think on it, a 4 out of 5 seems weak, yet I can’t justify a 5 because of the liminal space it straddles.