A review by dannymason_1
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

4.0

I had quite the soulacoaster with this book. I started on my physical copy and found it to be grating and gimmicky within 100 pages, so I gave up. Then I tried the audiobook and started to really enjoy it - wandering around listening to this stream-of-consciousness had a hypnotic effect and I felt the book starting to replace my internal monologue. After a while, I started to get a bit bored and frustrated with it again, it's just So Much and So Little at the same time and I wasn't sure it fully earned the amount of time you have to dedicate to it. By the end though, I felt it really paid off without ever entirely deviating from what it had already been doing. I found the last 100 or so pages extremely powerful in a way that I could see in retrospect was being set up by the rest of the book. Not sure I could recommend this to anybody because you need to come to it on your own terms, but it was a completely unique experience and deserves all its plaudits for that alone.