I've complained before about books that feel like expense reports, where you know the author had a stack of receipts for travel and more. You can spot them in the text like stepping stones: settings, restaurants, goods - this book is NOT one of those, but it evokes a similar sense of recognition for me - in this case a folder of unpublished vignettes that got taken out, dusted off and interspersed throughout - sometimes to amplify or repeat the themes of this intriguing novel, othertimes used more like filler or diversionary material during transitions. It's an interesting way of structuring a novel length work and entertaining to read.

Perhaps there was once upon a time a folder of loose leaf material - stories, fragments, pictures, postcards,excerpts, character sketches, etc and they scattered and were collected up. Then they were carefully arranged into a cunning and distinctly female piece of contemporary assemblage art ?

Depending on your mood, or whether you are looking right at it, or remembering it, or asking yourself if it changed the way you feel, your relation to this assemblage and it's creator can be one of frustrastion, admiration, dismissal, or suspended belief.

If you dwell on this assemblage too long, you're bound to wonder: "what if it was a bunch of crap in that folder? tucked in as padding? That book might have been great if it had been purpose built ? " But who knows ? Either way, the book explores some tough issues, draws some intense portraits of pressured relationships between women: sisters, admirers, friends, classmates, mothers & daughters, employees and bosses. It looks at the most difficult of male female relationships too: husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, an incestuous brother/sister pair, male abusers and their victims, and quietly consenting yet emotionally distanced lovers.

Unique, strangely timeless, recognized cities feel like themselves yet don't. An unsettling book that's meant to be that way ?!