I can't say this book was a joy to read; I found it quite sad and tragic frequently. But it is still a beautiful story of childhood best friend dynamics and how childish fancies can go further than originally intended. 

Agnès has just learned her childhood Fabienne is dead. (No, this isn't a spoiler.) They grew up together for a time in rural France, but eventually became estranged and their lives went different directions (Fabienne stayed in France while Agnès went to America). Agnès has decided that her old friend's death is the occasion that warrants revealing a childhood secret involving herself and Fabienne. She reveals their story excruciatingly slowly (I love a slow burn) and we find out that Agnès was no less than obsessed with Fabienne growing up. The dynamic was such that Fabienne made the decisions for the two of them every time they were together, and Agnès felt unable to make a decision for herself.

"Some people might wonder why Fabienne alone took up all my attention, as there must have been other schoolmates who would have made better friends. Some people might wonder why she chose me, when I seemed to offer her little other than obedient companionship. Surely there were other children, endowed with strong personalities, who would have been better matches for her. But people asking these questions do not understand children. Either they have had an insipid childhood, or, worse, they are determined to make childhood insipid in retrospect, so they become people who talk to children as if they were larvae or pupae. And if you are one of those people, I can assure you that many children you dismiss are more interesting than you are. And they despise you, rightly so." (p. 107)

Fabienne makes a choice one day that will change the course of their lives.

They will write stories and books together; Fabienne will be the creative mind while Agnès dutifully pens them. With a little help from an adult figure, they publish a book together, under Agnès' name only. This leads to fame from all around: how did a young girl from rural France come up with twisted stories and write so prolifically? Surely she couldn't have been educated or creative enough to come up with those ideas and words without the help from an adult! They write another book together, and Agnès prodigal fame continues to grow. They take her to Paris and eventually to a boarding school in England, where she is endlessly bored and instructed to write about her time in the school. As she spends time on her own away from Fabienne, she develops a creative mind of her own and doesn't want to write such fluff as her experiences at the school. She longs to be back home with Fabienne.

There's a lot of homoerotic subtext present in their relationship, and Agnès is constantly confused about Fabienne's feelings. They write to each other when Agnès is in England, but two letters are written each time: one to/from Fabienne, one to/from Fabienne's brother (Agnès' pretend boyfriend). Alleged proclamations of love confuse Agnès - is Fabienne making up these feelings on behalf of her "brother" or does Fabienne simply not know another way of letting Agnès know her deepest feelings? 

"Nothing is more inexplicable than friendship in childhood. It is not companionship, though the two are often confused. Childhood companionship is forced upon the children: two playmates whose parents like to share a drink on the weekend, a boy and a girl assigned to sit next to each other at school, families renting the neighboring holiday cabins every summer. Childhood friendship, though it has to meet the same geographical and temporal prerequisites, is something rarer: a child does not seek to bond with another child. The bond, defying knowledge and understanding, either is there, or is not; once a bond comes into existence, no child knows how to break from it until the setting is changed. It baffles me that often songs and poems are written about love at first sight: those who claim to experience the phenomena have preened themselves, ready for love. There is nothing extraordinary about that. Childhood friendship, much more fatal, simply happens." (p. 107)

Li reflects on friendships, the passage of time, and how we find meaning in our lives. 

"What’s happiness? she might ask me. 
Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one’s neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one’s hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday." (pp. 82-83)
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"A long time ago, when the game of writing was only an idea, like the idea of growing happiness, Fabienne said that we should write books together so people would know how it felt to be us. That, I now know, was the only mistake she made. What we wrote was about many things, but how about us. When the books were read by others, we were nowhere to be found. 

The real story was beyond our ability to tell: our girlhood, our friendship, our love — all monumental, all inconsequential. The world had no place for two girls like us, though I was slow then, not knowing that Fabienne, slighted, thwarted, even fatally wounded, tried to make a fool of that world, on her and on my behalf. Revenge is a story that often begins with more promises than the ending can offer." (pp. 347-348)
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"One day I would learn that Mrs. Townsend was a good record keeper. Of her own life and, for the duration when I was under her supervision, my life. People like Mrs. Townsend, who are obsessed with keeping a full account of their lives, are like artists who crest optical illusions. A year is a year anywhere, a day is a day for everyone, and yet with a few tricks these archivists make others believe that they have packed something into their days, something precious, enviable, everlasting, that is not available to everyone." (p. 174)

This is a unique coming-of-age story and a reflection on the friendships/relationships that shape us throughout our lives. It will stick with me for a while, and I'll share one more quote that stuck out to me:

"I now know that so much of our story began with Fabienne’s exultation and despair both out of my reach. For as long as I could be the outlet of her exultation and her despair, life was bearable, even interesting, to her. I was the whetstone that sharpened her mind’s blade; I was the organ that she cut into effortlessly. All the same I could not save us. It was not boredom that defeated us, it was not defeat that made us drift apart. Not every child is born with an untamable force within her. It is the world’s job to avert its eyes, writing that force off as childish tantrum, as immaturity. It is a child’s job to forbear that force until she, too, can write it off and sail into a safer adulthood. Fabienne had no words to describe her exultation and despair, and I had no way to grasp them, but she was not alone in her extremes. The lucky ones have waited out the storms. The really lucky ones who have learned a few tricks to tame the untamable — however momentarily — have made their names. I am not sophisticated enough to claim that I understand their geniuses, but I know what they have put in their symphonies and concertos, what they have put on their canvases or in their books, is what made Fabienne shriek in the cemetery. Through her hands I had heard her pain: there was something immense in her, bigger, sharper, more permanent, than the life we lived. She could neither find nor make a world to accommodate that immense being." (pp. 340-341)

This book tore me to pieces because of course it did. For me, it was a story of love, art, and the exploration of how these two things cannot be extricated from another. Both Sadie and Sam's character arcs are devastating. Their meeting was pure happenstance and their reintroduction in college was the same. This quiet longing was deeply personal for me. Sadie and Sam have an ambiguous relationship: not just friends, but something more intimate than a romantic relationship. We get glimpses of this intimacy between two friends who know each other well (perhaps too well) throughout the course of this book and their lives.

"The combination of the pre-dawn light and the snow was magical, like being inside a snow globe, a discrete world of their own. Sadie put her arm through Sam’s, and he leaned into her a little. They were tired, but it was an honest tiredness, the kind that comes when you know you have put everything you have into a project. Of course they would finish other games together, and the offices and the staffs on those games would be unimaginably larger. But Sam and Sadie would always remember this morning." (p. 105)
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“'No matter what happens, thank you for making me do this. I love you, Sam. You don’t have to say you love me, too. I know this kind of thing makes you terribly uncomfortable.'
'Terribly,' he said. 'Terribly.' Sam smiled, too wide, showing the huge mouth of crooked teeth that he was so self-conscious about, and he bowed awkwardly. Before he could tell her that he loved her, she was already inside. But he didn’t feel bad that he hadn’t said it. Sam knew that Sadie knew that he loved her. Sadie knew that Sam loved her in the same way she knew that Sam had not seen the Magic Eye [...] The universe, he felt, was just — or if not just, fair enough. It might take your mother, but it might give you someone else in return. As he rounded Kennedy Street, he began to chant to himself a poem that he had heard once, he wasn’t sure where. “That love is all there is; is all we know of love. It is enough; the freight should be proportioned to the groove.” (p. 106)
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"Sam’s heart swelled with love for Sadie. Why was it so hard for him to say he loved her even when she said it to him? He knew loved her. People who felt far less for each other said 'love' all the time, and it didn’t mean a thing. And maybe that was the point. He more than loved Sadie Green. There needed to be another word for it." (p. 162)

In the same instance, Zevin explores grief, creativity, and reinvention.

From the start, we are hit with difficult points of conversation: Sadie's sister is sick and spends a lot of time in the hospital, so Sadie meets Sam (recovering from a bad injury to his leg and foot) in the hospital and they connect over their love of video games. A friendship kindled in unlikely circumstances and while both characters are young and dealing with inner turmoils of their own (Sam, the death of his mother, and Sadie, the ever-looming potential death of her sister and being neglected by her parents).

"When she’d been retracing the walk she’d taken with him in that promise-filled dawn, she had been struck by how the exact same route could look and feel so different. One minute, Sam was there, the game was completed, and the world was filled with potential. Twelve hours later, Sam was gone, the game was far from her thoughts, and the world was grim and murderous. It is the same world, she thought, but I am different. Or is it a different world, but I am the same? For a moment, she felt dangerously untethered from her body and from reality, and she had to sit down to feel the ground beneath her, before she could continue searching for Sam." (p. 141)
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"Bong Cha narrowed her eyes at Sam, deciding if her grandson was trying to trick her into appearing foolish. 'Yes, in my mind, she did. I knew your mother so well I could play her part. The same with my own mother and my grandmother and my childhood best friend, Euna, who drowned in the lake by her cousin’s house. There are no ghosts, but up here' —she gestured toward her head— 'it’s a haunted house.'” (p. 311)

The exploration of grief is not limited to the early years of their lives, but the tragedies persist throughout the course of the book.

So much death, friendships that grow apart, secrets kept from each other, etc.

We reach a realistic conclusion. It may not be the conventional, storied tale of a happy ending, but it is satisfying in its own way.

Sadie and Sam are not romantically entangled, but they are forever enmeshed in each other's lives. They cannot be disentangled from each other.

I am comforted by Sam's evolution in the end:

"For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did." (p. 384)

THIS. BOOK. Let's start with structure. The way Sunyi Dean chose to tell this story is artistic, in itself. Interweaving the current timeline while providing the reader background information in between these chapters. She leaves us dates so we know how long ago these previous events took place (something I greatly appreciated), but it all serves the purpose to leave us wondering how Devon ended up where she is: on the run with her son, Cai, who just so happens to be a mind-eater. Oh yeah, and Devon consumes books like we eat a three-course meal.
 
A wild concept: a species of beings who subsist on books, can learn and know the subjects or stories that they eat, and - no surprise - the hierarchy of the book eaters is extremely archaic and they're a dying breed. Dean brings these characters to life on the page and in readers' minds. It's so hard not to empathize with this young mother and son runaway duo.

Overall what I loved: the structure, how intentionally Dean unveils Devon's story throughout the entire book, and the ways Dean depicts the complicated nature of traditional family ties.

I love that in the end, Devon and Cai have the opportunity to not only escape to relative freedom, but that she can see the destruction of her abusive brother, Ramsey, and Hester's brother, Killark.

What I thought it lacked: I felt that the ending was a little rushed

and wished that the confrontation with both Devon and Hester's brothers didn't happen all at once and so quickly

, but having a tenuously happy ending was satisfying for me. It definitely left me wondering how the rest of the surviving characters' lives would play out.

Will Araminder (Mani) stay in touch? Did their group make it safely into Ireland? It seemed a little sketchy that Jarrow and Vic would get only Cai and Devon undetected, but then they added Hester and Mani to the group, and that seems to complicate plans (in my head, anyway). Will Devon ever successfully rescue her daughter, Salem, from the clutches of the Families? Will the Families even still exist after the downfall of the Dragons and Knights?

So many unanswered questions, but perhaps it's better left that way sometimes.