Multiple pony-of-view story centering a family of Christian faith that interact with Crossroads, a group formed for the “hip”, new teens and their new (ostensibly) struggles, and the cross purposes of generations of different socialization generating internal and external drama.

Mostly my thoughts on this was: It works. The characters and believable. The dialogue is probably the bedrock, feeling organic and believable for every age group. I particularly admire that the individual belief structure is subjectively represented really well. Acting as a galvanizing force to create the best and worst qualities in the individual, and each unwilling to confront the aspect of their faith that incentivizes the terrible aspects of themselves they continually act out. Counterbalanced with their fostering of love and outreach in others who don’t oppose the catalysts of self-destruction, the characters feel fully fleshed out and nuanced.

However, as much as every interaction feels organic. There does exist an over engineered quality to the fiction at a meta level. Even it’s messiness feels like a display. And so it was hard to do more to admire the story at a distance, rather than get immersed in it. Everything interlocks. And there are conceits that are contrived, but those become visibly necessary to the reader, adding to the artificial quality of the plotting. I bet most people wouldn’t mind this at all. It’s a subjective quibble but, I think why I was completely taken with it as others seem to be.

Though meandering at times, lacking a throughline many memoirs often deploy to keep things grounded, I know the authors work and was interested in his life and learning more about him, personally, because I live in Canada and am interested in indigenous culture.

A fairly big chunk is his childhood residential school story, so it’s worth pointing out trigger warnings for violence and sexual assault against minors. Though less brutal than others, some have contextualized this as sympathize to residential schools. I don’t think it is. He finds positive things about being there, like having an extended family, of sorts, in the people he went to school with and others who were forced to those places. But also talks about sexual assault he experienced personally. It feels fair and in it is his experience, he can contextualize it however he likes, imo.

Otherwise, I found the things he recalls about his life and indigenous experience valuable and insightful. He’s lived a long time and seen a lot of change in Canada, and applies a unique lens to the worst and best he’s witnessed.

This flew by. Read it in one sitting. In some ways, I’ve read similar stories. The disappearance of a young girl shakes a town. But contextualized through the lens of an older man reflecting on that time, and his personal trial and examination of his brother, in particular, makes this far more of interesting than the tropes present.

Highly relatable, too, is that every character seems raw and real and broken; lending a complexity to each that would almost certainly have rendered the ultimate conclusion of the mystery toothless and maybe even problematic, had the author not done that work throughout.

Simple prose done very well. No stand-out specificity in the diction, but excellent, believable dialogue and reactions from characters drives the drama engine. As mentioned, highly consumable. Almost addictively consumable. Great stuff.

This is a difficult book to form an opinion on for me because I tend to look at the craftwork of a novel in a very analytical sense. I’ve tried to watch and read a bunch of reviews on this before coming to an opinion, something I never do, usually. Mostly because everyone I know thinks of this in glowing terms. What I’ve come to realize with this is I think the authorial intent is atypical.

For me, the concept of this book was excellent. More so than the granularity of sailing and war and military type fiction, which made the drama take place in a setting I couldn’t care a whit about. Then the characters felt somewhat discordioate with things until a few of the conceits are revealed. And this is where I think the people that disliked this book tend to focus.

But I actually think the authorial intent is just different than people expected. It’s much more concerned with conveying something about history and maintaining an emotion. The craftwork bends to accommodate those goals, and that’s why it’s so polarizing. I actually thought of this as more a three star read until I thought on it for the day. Now I think it did exceed my expectations, which were subverted. In the end, I like that about it, though. When thinking about the central sort of tenants of the intent here, the issues I had make sense for what this book is trying to achieve. It’s queer, it’s trying to communicate something about imperialism and hegemony and a lot of things about history and memory.

I think you have to pay attention to the strangeness of the dream, so to speak. And also just realize that there is a vibe that Pulley is trying to maintain throughout. So yeah, the protagonist reading a letter slowly, in parts, is a plot device. But it also says something about history as it relates to his memory. So if you have a gut reaction and don’t think on the primary themes, you really could miss the Forrest for the trees, I think.

Had the prose work been there and I had been more interested in the myopic setting for around half of it, I think I’d be left with even more of a positive impression of it. And yeah, I realize this review is more about my thought process ON the review than the book. Much of the fun of this book is going in blind though, I think. It’s very difficult to talk about W what makes it interesting without spoilers.

So I won’t.

One of those, ‘could write about their grocery list’ authors. This strikes a perfect note many times. Is it a flawless overall arrangement? No, I don’t think so. But what this does is so rare, it’s quite precious. At once verbalizing a foreign experience of womanhood and motherhood and sisterhood, while also being so forthcoming the granularity makes it a relatable story that taps the vein of a powerful and moving human experience. A condition of life being expressed through a wonderful but too often limited format of language, essentially.

In attempting to translate another woman’s work from the past and recreate a history, it becomes anthropological. A woman reconstituting womens’ history to get information for herself she knows she needs and simply can’t be (easily) found or accessed by most women. Then delving into her own past, showcasing her past and present hurts in a staggering manner. And then also weaving in poetics, finally the translated poem.

While it does open so strongly and viscerally there is some middle book syndrome, as it is impossible to maintain, nor would you, I think, want it to last so long?, the lows are more like apt and astute parts of really good memoirs—the highs, again, not something I’ve only very rarely been moved to.

Rarely have I started a book and immediately not gotten on with the tone, perspective, and idiosyncratic style. Repeated words and phrases were annoying, the constant “we”, and pages about consuming books was meta in a way that I immediately disliked. Not even going to try and soldier on to inevitably just give it a one star, not worth my evening on the off chance it shifts to my taste.

2.5 rounded up

A fun twist shores up an otherwise lack of interesting prose and cardboard characters. Very much focused solely on the plot, which sometimes make progress ponderous. As a piece of commercial genre fiction though, it stands up because of the more novel pieces integrated here.

There does feel like a certain level of earnestness and ability to hone in on what is “interesting”. To some degree, I think it’s just luck, as far as if the reader finds the same things as the author to be compelling. In this case, 75% of the time, the answer for this reader is “yes”. The whole time I was consuming this (on audio) I was thinking about how much better these topics and thoughts are than The Anthropocene Reviewed, which was an onslaught of mundanity and boredom, causing me to DNF it. Though, I read and like Patchett and haven’t read much Green at all. So, to what degree is it also a parasocial influence? Who knows.

For me though, Patchett’s honesty around how fiction has influenced her life were very relatable. I think stories and fiction itself is kind of like advertising, you are affected as you consume it—whether or not you _believe_ it or not is meaningless. I am aware that most of my beliefs and thoughts come from relationships to some type of fiction or another, so there was a lot of “seen” moments in this.

It’s affecting, how able Patchett is able to bare these really personal things. Many of them people might look at you funny at a party if you brought it up. I always appreciate when an author just puts things out there, interrogating the notions or not, and just shows how they’re constructed by articulating stories that are formative.

One or two I didn’t care about. Quite a few were some of the highest quality of writing. About what I expected, yet still exceeded my expectations. Close to a 5 star, but not quite.

Heads up: this is a review of an Uncorrected proof.

In Norway, a mother loses her daughter under suspicious circumstances, and the specialist squad handling underaged kids are called to handle it. Elsewhere, and in another time, a college nursing student develops an unhealthy, dark obsession with a snake. As the timelines intertwine the story of trauma and pain is explored through the unraveling of multiple threads.

This is a multiple point-of-view, duel timeline (and change) mystery, suspense thriller. I am not sure the blurb does the reader much service with comparisons to Gillian Flynn and Tana French. Jo Nesbø is more akin to it, since it’s upmarket prose wise. Tonally, it is pretty dark; I’m sure that’s where Flynn comes from. But the French, I guess because some of the perspectives are from cops on a squad? But it also suggests a bit more complexity to the characters, plot, and especially the prose. It’s a mixed bag.

It’s pretty much exactly what the plot says it is though. It follows through. The prose get out of the way when at their best. The plot, as many of these multiple POV, multiple timelines stories tend to go, is really quite slow and artificially pumped up with short chapters, thriller style. It’s above standard commercial fiction. This explores trauma in an interesting but contrived manner. You really need to suspend your disbelief. I’m sure some of this has cases in real life, but there isn’t craftwork present to make some of aspects believable. As it goes on, this gets exacerbated. I think your mileage may vary on that front. A couple specific conceits you either can roll with, or not.

If you do manage to accept the premise and the conceits as they appear, there’s a satisfying through-line traced here.