A review by manoncremers
Multitudes by Lucy Caldwell

4.0

Not often do I come across a book whose title actually perfectly embodies what it is hiding inside. Multitudes, however, is such a book. Having read Lucy Caldwell's Mayday and Here We Are before, I was already similar to some extent with how Caldwell masterfully creates a story that each time is unlike what she's written before. Each story in Multitudes forms its own entity; its own voices; its own desires. Yet once put together, these slices of life accumulate to various levels of the same feelings of nostalgia and melancholia. And even though my ratings for these eleven stories are as numerous as the stories themselves, the five-star ones compensate for all of it. While Through The Wardrobe, Here We Are, Ally Ally O, and Killing Time flung me back to a time filled with teenage angst, annoyance, giggles, and lies, specifically Poison and Thirteen struck me the most because of how they demonstrated the lengths pre-teens (myself included) were willing to go for the approval and even admiration of their peers.

Oh how we thought we were already adults, when our lives had only just begun.