I’ve now read two books in a row where editors and author don’t know that the singular form of dice is die. Of course, the very last page on this has to have that on it. Haunted me this entire damn book. The die is cast. Not the dice ffs. (David Mitchell is the other author with a book peppered with this mistake, btw).

ANYWAY—Astra is a pretty interesting book. One which I’ve got mixed feelings on, if I’m honest. From just after conception to her reaching old-ish age—70s, it seems like—we leap from character to character in linear time; receiving her life filtered through individuals that orbit her for various proximity and length.

Usually, these people go from not understanding Astra very well, to catching a glimpse of who she is. Often, they’re not understanding of her trauma or triggering it.

I have complicated feelings about using these people as devices to portray Astra, a person immediately abandoned by her family to fend for herself, spring boarding her into various forms of trauma she has to process by herself. They generally don’t have interesting stories themselves either, though this varies from tedious to great. Sometimes they occur, other times they’re there to give a brief snapshot of a specific time period. It’s just a bit… weird? I guess? To tell a person’s story, especially as loaded as it is, via everyone else’s lens.

On the one hand, I really like that we see her grow to be who she is despite this adversity and despite people who, pretty literally are drawn to her because of her trauma in order to sculpt her into what they want. Or otherwise project themselves onto her. There’s perseverance there. And there is an arc and a sort of plot, in the way that anyones life story would be a kind of plot. Luckily this comes together for a pretty nice ending. Some of which ties together some seemingly fairly loose threads the book weaves near the start.

But while we see Astra via others, I also don’t really feel like we know her that well, either. And so, the small epilogue where it finally is her at the end narrating, doesn’t feel like it’s enough. The sum total of her is fragmentary interactions, most of which were harmful to her person in some way. And so, while it’s nice to see some progress of her, it still feels very odd to spend most of your time in superfluous narratives in which the point is another character, and so most of the content isn’t exactly pertinent. It’s also quite unreliable.

I like that it’s a bit out of the box, but in, say, The Bone Clocks, where every chapter revolves around Holly in linear snapshots, each chapter is a short story that ties into the meta story and that character is well developed and has a plot and it’s beats. You get everything. Whereas this is never actually centering Astra, nor does it have very interesting characters or arcs, typically. It’s well written and interesting conceptually, yet it tries to refuse what people want from a story… ostensibly to paint a complex character via others. I’m not sure I can say that it fully succeeds, as you can tell.

Does it matter we never really come to understand Astra as she sees herself? I don’t know. It’s interesting enough that it exceeded my expectations of it. And I don’t think it having to be completely success affects my expectations, since it wasn’t what I expected—and I like that. It’s obviously thought provoking and slightly different than other narratives similar to it. Im glad it exists and think it took some chops to bookend it so well. The ending really does feel like a resolution I hadn’t expected.

So, yeah, mixed bag. Not completely surprised it didn’t make it to the short list of the Giller but also very happy it made it to the longlist. I nabbed it even before then, so I’m ahead of the curve.