You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.85 AVERAGE
3.85 AVERAGE
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I will be thinking about this book for some time. If you don’t like a concrete ending, this book is not for you.
Pew is found sleeping in a church pew, only to be taken in by a religious family who believes they can save this persons live. However, Pew’s silence and ambiguity makes the family impatient and annoyed. They are stuck between “what would Jesus do” and “what would a human do?” As Pew appears to be uncooperative with their desire to know their gender and backstory, Pew is driven more and more to keep silent, not revealing anything and reflecting on why these characters are so important in the first place. A human is a human, why does there need to be more classification?
Spoilers ahead:
Pew’s silence makes people uncomfortable, to the point where they reveal secrets they normally would not share. Pew learns more and more about human nature and some interesting ideas about introspection arise.
The novel ends in the town’s odd forgiveness festival, where town members reveal their sins in an anonymous matter. Here is where I am still processing - this town clearly has a dark past of racial segregation and injustice and even darker past of human sacrifice? This was unclear, but the ending where some readers may be annoyed was quite beautiful to me. Pew ends up leaving the town after the festival, the reader learning nothing of the person. Pew challenges the idea that we need to fit into a box, that we can and should treat people as people, and that we demand too much for people to fit into certain boxes.
Pew is found sleeping in a church pew, only to be taken in by a religious family who believes they can save this persons live. However, Pew’s silence and ambiguity makes the family impatient and annoyed. They are stuck between “what would Jesus do” and “what would a human do?” As Pew appears to be uncooperative with their desire to know their gender and backstory, Pew is driven more and more to keep silent, not revealing anything and reflecting on why these characters are so important in the first place. A human is a human, why does there need to be more classification?
Spoilers ahead:
Pew’s silence makes people uncomfortable, to the point where they reveal secrets they normally would not share. Pew learns more and more about human nature and some interesting ideas about introspection arise.
The novel ends in the town’s odd forgiveness festival, where town members reveal their sins in an anonymous matter. Here is where I am still processing - this town clearly has a dark past of racial segregation and injustice and even darker past of human sacrifice? This was unclear, but the ending where some readers may be annoyed was quite beautiful to me. Pew ends up leaving the town after the festival, the reader learning nothing of the person. Pew challenges the idea that we need to fit into a box, that we can and should treat people as people, and that we demand too much for people to fit into certain boxes.
This was a page turner and unlike anything else I’ve read. A fascinating POV. I found the ending unsatisfying, and while that was likely the point, I struggle not to have things tied up neatly!
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
medium-paced
I can’t say this was a satisfying book or a clear book or even that entertaining of a book but I couldn’t stop thinking about it and it just flowed like the words were meant to written together.
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
This books is phenomenal. It leaves you wondering and thinking, going back to the beginning and at the end again, asking yourself “did I miss something?”. However, it is not frustrating as a reader, because we know we were being set up for something, hoping for a reveal doesn’t guarantee one. It opens interpretations the same way Kafka’s Metamorphosis: what does Pew mean? What does Pew represent? Is Pew even a person? This novel is easy to read, but not easy to interpret. I loved it, top 10 books of my 2022.
I get it, but so what?
Pew is the embodiment of post-modern non-essentialism, of transient relativism. The environment they are in is highly structured and righteous, leading to coercion - and, importantly, the creation of ritual and language which allows the forgetting of the coercion through “forgiveness” and “God’s grace”. This de-historicises even while history continues to thrive and run deep - a different form of de-historicising vs Pew’s… but is it less harmful? Is this just some weird horseshoe theory?
What this was missing for me was a ‘so what’. Was it a message of moderation? To loosen our grip on fixed identities, but not to loosen them so much that we forget and bury grievance or context? If so, this novel didn’t clearly deliver that message. It just left an uneasiness
Pew is the embodiment of post-modern non-essentialism, of transient relativism. The environment they are in is highly structured and righteous, leading to coercion - and, importantly, the creation of ritual and language which allows the forgetting of the coercion through “forgiveness” and “God’s grace”. This de-historicises even while history continues to thrive and run deep - a different form of de-historicising vs Pew’s… but is it less harmful? Is this just some weird horseshoe theory?
What this was missing for me was a ‘so what’. Was it a message of moderation? To loosen our grip on fixed identities, but not to loosen them so much that we forget and bury grievance or context? If so, this novel didn’t clearly deliver that message. It just left an uneasiness
eerie sinister dreamlike but ultimately too ambiguous of an ending.
dark
funny
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes