whoischels 's review for:

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

3.0

emotional reflective medium-paced

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This did not do it for me. The reveal of the killer was disappointing and you could see it from a mile away.

It felt incredibly cheap to have the "mystery" revolve around the fact that the narrator was simply omitting her role as the killer from her telling of the story. There was no compelling reason given for her to make this omission.

I think it would have been better, thematically, if the killer was not revealed and remained a natural mystery. Not sure how that could quite be pulled off, but the whole thing sort of ended in a nothing.

I have complicated feelings about the prose. I really liked that certain improper nouns were capitalized and I thought that made the narrator's voice really stand out. But I was reading a bit about Polish grammar and it seems that many improper nouns get capitalized in that language depending on the sentence structure. So leaving this capitalized was probably a brilliant decision on the part of the translator, but it made me a bit sad to find it was probably not a strategy the author used to give the character more depth. 

That said, I was just not very impressed by this narrator. I encounter this type of lady every day living in Northern California.

Considering what this character ends up doing—three killings!—

, I would have expected more digging into what it is making her tick and the contradictions inside of her, and generally just more grit and ugliness inside her. That's not really what we got, and I found it lacking.

The story is very fun to read though, and the nature imagery is very bleak, which I really liked.