When I read reviews characterizing Roy's writing style as "Faulknerian," I started to understand why this book has left me cold. The gothic "grotesqueness" of an infighting family (and society) combined with linguistic strangeness is just a couple of stylistic barriers too many. There are also times when Roy's handling of exposition irks me, like the way she summarizes important events through narration instead of letting them play out as scenes. In terms of politics, insight, and vision there are a lot of things I admire, and I can understand why this book would mean so much to other people. But I found myself distinguishing between admiration and true affection as I read on.

I really struggled with this. There are so many signifiers of things that I love--ornery old men, literature, quaint seaside towns--but while there is some charm to it I found almost the entire book to be mawkish and pandering. I'm going to interrogate my own reactions in the next couple of days, though, because God knows I've loved some mawkish and pandering shit in my life.

I suspect it has something to do with the writing. A lot of the dialogue functions only as a delivery vehicle for exposition, and the prose just lies there on the page and expects literary references to act as substance. I like intertextuality as much as the next pomo nerd but this is kind of like that one person who mistakes their ability to quote The Simpsons with having an actual sense of humor, to paraphrase NPR's Linda Holmes.

I think Marisa de los Santos is a better sentence-for-sentence writer than other more famous authors doing this form. I have a slight problem with the way the romance storyline played out at the very very end but it was pretty much an expected feature of the romance genre.