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artemishi's review
challenging
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Typical of A.S. King novels, this one gripped me from the start. It's surreal (magical realism) which I generally find fascinating, but also Tru's voice is the most earnest, authentic, and wise of the entire cast (including adults)- a refreshing change.
Overall, I found it engaging even in its weirdness, and poetic.
Overall, I found it engaging even in its weirdness, and poetic.
Part of why this resonated with me is the broad pandemic parallels. It was published in 2021, and I'm not sure if King was writing like the wind for a year to get this to the world, or if this predated COVID-19. The premise is different (in the book, all time has stopped in June 2020) but people are handling a worldwide crisis by ignoring it/finding artificial ways to replace the thing they're lost, studying it/to replace it with something new or find out why it froze in the first place, and still being jerks to each other. And the majority of people are acting as if nothing monumental happened, trying to "get back to normal", and so on.
Tru draws on psychology (which makes sense, as time is an artificial human construct) but which blew my mind and required several long pauses of thought. I related to her in that, like Tru, it took the pandemic for me to actually acknowledge and fully feel my feelings (the option of avoidance and dissociation was taken from me). That's mostly where the parallel ended, but King does a lovely job of drawing you in and investing you in the book. So much of it is subtle, around the meaning of words (and relies on metaphor), from the fact that "sister" is never named to the slash used in nearly every paragraph to denote an either/or selection, which to me underscored the possibility for things to be always both options until the reader/receive makes their own interpretation in a Schrödinger's cat sort of situation.
The two primary themes are latent potential in every person (embodied by Tru) and the power of language to shape everything (embodied by her family and her situation). The first sounds trite, and to me it played backup to the second.
If this book had a moral, it would be: Once you break free from the limitations of language that others have placed on you, you can truly see the potential in the world and choose what you do- but if you don't make your choices with compassion for others and yourself, you'll cause damage and that will limit you again.
Content Warnings
Minor: Emotional abuse, Vomit, Physical abuse, Pedophilia, and Animal cruelty
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