These are the prose I’m looking for. What a well executed book in every respect. A pleasure to consume, fantastic at conveying interiority of characters, and deft at swapping tone - a rare gift. It also manages to have quite a few things to say in a straight forward, but, I think, not simplistic narrative. Setting up the story by having Janie return home and sitting down with a friend to discuss what had happened to her was pretty effective for me. I always seem to like that framing. Though, the narrative does not actually look or feel as though she’s conveying her story in that way, to her friend. It does a time jump to those events. It felt surprisingly cinematic, actually.

My one complaint most often seems a stylistic one. I felt this could stand to further breath in some parts. As beautiful as it’s told, I didn’t feel a sense of place all that much, and that seems to be, I’ve learned, a pretty central component to my 5 star reads. I have a mind that likes specificity when setting scenes and expounding on character. Without it, the world feels nebulous. I had this problem with Wolf Hall even, where the dialogue and prose are top notch, yet it refused to paint a scene and it bugged me to no end. This isn’t quite that bad. But it certainly made it somewhat difficult to populate the world sometimes. Some people won’t be bothered by this at all, and I can see why it has so many 5 star ratings from the people In my circle here.