A review by nohoperadio
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

4.0

Two to three times per year I’ll try something published in the past decade, and this usually just results in renewed bafflement as to how anyone survives reading mostly new books without going crazy. Let time do a little sifting guys! The new books are just going to get old tomorrow anyway! But then that Claire-Louise Bennett book I picked up fresh eight years ago did change my life, so you know.

I did enjoy this one however. It’s true that “weirdly intense, partly one-sided, semi-gay teenage friendship that tries and fails to exclude the outside world entirely” is a particular emotional weak

point of mine, but this is a good and original version of that thing. Two young French girls who can only process their intimate feelings for each other by playing wacky pranks on people decide that their next wacky prank will be to write and publish a book of short stories about dead children, which leads to instant critical acclaim and one of the girls being sent abroad to an English finishing school; this greatly complicates the nature of their pranking and therefore the nature of their love, they’re forced to get more creative on both planes of being with mixed results, the whole thing ends in quiet anticlimax, which is to say it ends brutally. Yes, I did enjoy this one.