The majority of this is captivating and precocious, well observed. She even has the wherewithal to read her own thoughts and feelings from previous chapters to reflect and contextualize. It does the job and then some of showing, in a particular way, the loss and atrocity of cutting short lives like Anne’s. She was obviously literary inclined and had modest dreams that would have no doubt been realized.

A chorus of eclectic, peripheral characters that go to the same pool form a microworld of rules to regulate various aspects of their lives lightly touched upon, yet also interminable.

Luckily, it then shifts to a new chapter from the point of view of an old person, halfway in, with memory issues. Except that it switches to second person and it’s prescriptive about who the person is in a way that simply didn’t work for me and felt like far more of a gimmick than anything else that was being attempted, so I put it down on page 91 of 176.

I’m assuming the two stories converge but I had a grandmother die of dementia just months ago and the self-generation of an alternate identity with an unknown (when I stopped reading), but close, relationship with the character. But I also just don’t like second person perspective like this. I’ve read one story where it was pulled off, but it was still a generalization of a group of people and not a specific person. I like second person when it’s eluding to a character in a mysterious way you are trying to figure out, like an open letter to someone. But when it’s used to insert the reader it almost never works for me.

A polyphonic grouping mostly comprised of immigrants, all trying to find their way in a city that sells them something that doesn’t exist. Moving from something that feels like cinematic plays—or tracking shots—to meat of narratives with each chapter, this 1925 text feels really contemporary sometimes, especially when weaving between perspectives and contextualizing things very cinematically and emotionally.

It doesn’t escape being antiquated though. Lots of characters feel like caricatures. They’re openly racist. I doubt any one character arc will be surprising. Oh, and they ride carriages sometimes, dodging new-fangled cars. The plotting is intricate and comes together nicely to form the themes. But I doubt I’ll even remember a character name in a day or two. I never once felt attached. We are far more than arms length.

More than most this could be a 4 on a day when I’m thinking Fondly about it. Because it does feature great writing and it feels like it might have impacted literature to the degree of perhaps even forging these quintessential stories and this type of fiction. There’s some progressive ideas and the intent of it is explicit enough that the antiquated features are undeniably blind spots. There’s some queer characters and an abortion story, which feels ahead of it’s time, but also of it’s time.

A mostly effective narrative showcasing the absolute dogged, often casual and assumed, violence against women in a tourist location. Alternating between two perspectives and timelines we slowly construct the lives of each, and it answers how they have come to the circumstances they’re in, as they are brutalized by partners they never really chose in the first place, since they were controlled and abused even prior to it becoming physical.

The violence varies and is absolutely interminable, for a specific point. I thought it was a form meets structure choice that worked very well, but we also draining of the reader. It is also brutal, and feels like a wake up call without being sensational. It’s a matter-of-face tone embedded, and the stories are almost perfunctory; especially as as they build and dovetail together, showing the ways in which trauma plays a part in the perpetuation of this kind of cycle. It will absolutely be triggering for some people, covering incest rape, gaslighting, domestic violence, and degrees and forms of these in other circumstances.

I read the book and the audiobook and have to say that the audiobook is really excellent. If you’re having problems clicking with the voice on the page, absolutely try the audiobook. It ended up supplanting my physical reading, which basically never happens. Usually it’s just for chores and walks, etc. I am not completely sure how the perspective would have played with me otherwise. It became inseparable to my experience.

I found this riveting and interesting, but I also have very little knowledge to pull from regarding every aspect of the story, so I think this is specifically for a reader like me. I wasn’t particularly annoyed by fast-and-loose time jumps, presumably because of the access to the information available where there isn’t much inference made.

I thought it goes without saying that the story about this man is just a matter of fact and not the author “siding” with what took place. Several instances of his overt ignorance and racist attitudes are made to draw attention to what he was like and show him for who he was. And how each country operated, ie. flooding China with opium, financing their entire economy off the reciprocal relationship that destroyed many lives. It is simply how, based on information found, the proliferation of tea in the UK happened, as well as plenty of other flora and fauna that is taken for granted in the locale today.

If you’re a laymen like me to the subject, I imagine you’d find just as much enjoyment from it as I did. The author does a great job putting together an enticing story primarily from the life of one man, peripherally adding other components for context. If you want the character to be a good person and likeable I would stay clear. Every indication, such as pretending to be a foreign Chinese man himself, ignoring customs and integral aspects of the culture, to get what he wants, extrapolates how the west interacted with the east generally. As it’s a matter of fact chronicled in his own stories and he was a representative, the embodiment of the kinds of business practices trade companies forged.

Where it did get cringe worthy, for me, was the author narrating the audiobook (presumably also on the page, but I didn’t follow along, I alternated) and she spoke in dialect and broken English, which I think was quotes directly from sources. But it was… yeah, not great. Paraphrasing stuff like that would have been a leg up, over replicating the caricature broken English Fortune wrote down. Otherwise, I think it tries to stay balanced and allows for him to show himself and the culture as what it was. As swashbuckling and ingenious as he was at stealing tea, he’s also an encapsulation of the East India company on several fronts, botanists, and “adventurers”. A good choice for the framing of the story, I think.

This book really comes together in the last bit. Planting suggestions about whom actually authored these books in a post-modern way, which is a reference early on in her career. Lots of references to cyclical structures to progress the plot in an ostensibly linear way. Overt mentions of themes planted in her books, which aren’t these, but also kind of are. The inability to escape patterns in childhood. The responsibility for the things we create. From the minutiae of fiction to child rearing. It really covers a staggering amount of content and impressive draws a through-line from the very first book to now, while managing to be both surprising and inevitable. Such that the characters in their infancy may have been constructed by who she witnesses them to be in the neighbourhood in her maturity.

Fantastic stuff, as always. It does feel like a sudden break into an onslaught of events and content when you reach a certain section, only because it’s a device that I don’t think was used to that extent in previous books. But the acclimation is quick and builds to something poignant. It’s the closest thing to an annoyance I can come up with.

This is a story of a boy and a girl who meet and bond at a young age while playing Mario. But the story begins much further than that, after they’ve gone their own way for a while, and don’t know one another anymore, for some, unknown reason. It’s also about those people making video games. More so, actually, about why they make them. They also get in each other’s way; wether it is a love triangle, quintessential communication problems hinging on insecurities, or life throwing curve balls.

It is also a book with a much stronger later half than first, in my opinion. If you’re hoping it’s about the industry or the granularity of making a video game, you will be disappointed. But it does do a good job of rooting why they make the game into an emotional framework and then complicating it with the messiness of being human, and not white cis male identities. While the book is weak at its dramatic plot beats, more-or-less, it does use them to its advantage in the later half. The immensely trite love triangle era germinates. And because the formula of the current context occurs, then there is backstory of why one of them is the way they are; trauma tied to aforementioned identity component—the fruition does work. I’m not sure it’s the best way to get there. But I can look back at my least favourite parts and know why it is there and what it’s doing.

For millennial gamers that have that aspect as something tied to their super-identity, like me, I think this will be a cathartic experience. It manages to replicate the feeling of playing a game that moves you, staying with you forever. Why X game does this and what it evokes. What X game means to the creator. As a tabletop role-playing game designer who grew up wanting to play games like the ones in this book: slightly different, narratively focused and personal games, this really landed for me, ultimately.

In some ways it feels inspired by Halt and Catch Fire. Or I’m projecting that onto the text, I really don’t know. In that show, it’s about a trio of characters, just like here—two of whom are best friends—who chart an alternate history of a tech company that never was, and it turns into a game company and an internet company. But the heart of that show is the characters, and the main plot beats of the show are in this book, as well as the attempt at showing the confluence of many things that go into creative endeavours, business endeavours, and the relationship dynamics between friends. So, If you’ve watched the best show no one watched, and you’re wondering if this is like that, I feel comfortable saying you would probably like this book.

I haven’t read fiction about this kind of thing before, so I really love it for that. It’s a bit messy, somewhat inelegant until the final third, but it’s got plenty of heart and does a good job of showing it.

Keeping in mind 3 stars in my rating system is it met my expectations, that’s a decent rating for a classic. As much as they are lauded and hyped up, it’s then often hard for a classic to exceed my expectations or surprise me.

I really liked the prose work, though slightly contrived for the main narrators to be as simultaneously extra and erudite with diction, the prose styling was engaging and good. It is also a bit too much constructed for me, though. Meaning it is wildly plotty and is then overstuffed with symbolism and allusions, especially as it goes on and characters have similar names and characteristics to get across the main themes, which begin to beat you over the head until the actual climax plot beat, arguably the only one I actually wanted to know, and kept me reading.

Somethings I did admire about it though, were the indelible nature of physical abuse taking a toll. For the time, it feels more progressive than expected? But, counter to that is the draining over melodrama that manages to curtail how serious it is even as it attempts to prove that very point. It’s also somewhat hindered by how unreliable the narrators are, sometimes. I didn’t feel much satisfaction or even any resolution to that fact; further working to undermine the seriousness for telling something with significant drama. If a number of the narrators undermine one another, it makes it feel more contrived, overblowing what was ostensibly witnessed.

Loved the atmosphere and was here for the drama at some points though. Ending was a bit toothless in favour of The Message.

Short and sweet meditation on the ways in which society forces binaries. In art, gender, heck, just about everything. Whereas people reinvent themselves all the time. They code switch, they go through phases, they have less or more time available, their interests shift. Many of the things discussed I resonated with and I think are approached very thoughtfully.

“We are all mythologies. Mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean. This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.”

This is absolutely the strongest book I’ve read from this author. It is slightly recursive, as all her books seem to be—which will bother some people in the same way as the pet peeve I have: When a character thinks something and then immediately says that thing. I get it. It’s endearing, maybe funny (to some people). But I find it so annoying, and Lucy does this multiple times. Lucy gets away with a lot, with me, though. Mostly because she’s most affecting when she’s a little bit fumbling. She would call this “honest”, probably.

In this, I don’t know if there is a word for it but I call them eulogy novels, there is a central figure that is being spoken to and has since passed. Recently or otherwise. There is a quality akin to an exorcism to them. Not scary, but cathartic. Working through something typically quite painful, or working it’s way to a thought like an epiphany, only smaller. This is exactly that, and I like this trend.

Also, many of the themes introduced in the first two books, and which Strout was not Quite there on (for me), land here; and they land well. The trajectory of a life in question due to the early patterns, particularly around poverty, in particular, feel like what Strout has been trying to say these past books. Here, because there is the shape of what has past (if you read the previous books) and the choices that seem inevitable for the characters, though unknown to the reader, transgress into the hyper reality of good fiction. In which something becomes about the human condition, and therefor about seemingly everything.

Perhaps this is because I grew up in poverty and feel exactly the way it is articulated here. Not close to it. Exactly like this. To have it mirrored in a way that touches many of the characters that have been mining this, feels impactful in a way none of the other books were. With the small caveat, just like the previous book, I really don’t know how I would feel about this had I not read the previous ones. Would it be a 5 star read? I’m not sure. Certainly an4 star. Together, though, I can tell you this book feels like a modern classic. And, thankfully, the sentimentality is struck perfectly here—again, in a way that didn’t quite hit the mark previously. Slightly too sickly sweet and self-help, peppered with an unearned moment or two. This is, I am happy to say, very well earned.