My feelings after finishing this book were similar to my feelings after the first Joyce Carol Oates book I read, Cathage. I'm not sure if I liked it, but I was fascinated by it, and I enjoy being fascinated by things. Since this is the second time I've felt this way, I think I can hesitantly say I enjoy JCO's writing (albeit very hesitantly).

She writes in a very strange way, almost as though she's phrasing everything in an intentional difficult way, and as a result you have to pay particular attention to the words themselves. All the right parts of the sentence will be there, but the order is off or they'll be split into multiple sentences that don't naturally flow into each other. It's strange, but it forced me to be an active participant in the words themselves and I think I liked that. It's definitely not for everyone, but I think it's for me.

I don't think she's as good at covering social issues (like abortion, adoption, death penalty, ableism etc) as she thinks she is. They don't feel like they're quite as deep or well discussed as they need to be, and they're handled so clumsily. It feels like she's actively having a discussion on abortion outside the narrative of the story, but then stops short of a full, nuanced discussion. Adoption in this book was particularly bad. One of the characters has an adopted younger sister who is painfully othered by the family, and never once treated as part of the family by the narrative. Honestly, if every mention of her was just deleted, nothing about the book would need to be changed. She wasn't important and most references to her were either kind of racist (referring to an east Asian girl as a doll repeatedly) or just uncomfortable when it came to adoption (she asked her mother about her birth mother giving her up, and the adoptive mother said "she didn't mean it").

My biggest issue with this book was that I didn't buy into the characters. I didn't believe them as people. Their motivations didn't make sense to me, and they didn't feel real. I think a big part of this was because most of the narrators had some kind of neurodivergence, whether brain damage, mental illness, or learning disabilities (none ever diagnosed or discussed in detail). Because she never went into detail or diagnosed them, there was never a logical sense to how they functioned. It seemed random and not well thought out, existing more for the sake of roundabout writing than because of them as people. It was interesting to read this book as a case study on the situation, but I neither cared about nor understood any of the characters. Which is weird to say because it's entirely a character driven story, but it still worked for me.

The story itself was fascinating. I loved the way it unfolded, and I couldn't stop turning the page. I don't usually go for nonlinear storytelling, but this is almost like nonlinear storytelling in a linear way. It's in chronological order, but not a single coherent storyline. And I loved it. It was one of those books I couldn't anticipate what would happen next.

I will add that the ending was not my favorite. It felt unsatisfying, to wrap up an entire difficult book like this in a neat bow. It felt like a slapped on ending, rather than one that fit the rest of the story. And there was a 70 page section about how one of the characters trained to become a professional boxer, which was a completely random and unnecessary aside.

Overall, I enjoyed the experience. I don't think it tackles abortion particularly well (certainly not badly either, but not well), and I don't think it's quite as masterful as some people seem to think JCO is, but it left me wanting to read more of her. I was fascinated, and I quite enjoy being fascinated by a work of literature.