jennicjul 's review for:

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter

3.0

---

Beautifully written. The spareness generates a dreamy, poetic atmosphere, and the language is stellar. But there is just something odd about taking a narrative about environmental disaster and displacement--which are affecting real people in real time, this very day--and stripping out so much materiality and context, reassigning the story to a nameless, assumedly white, middle class woman and shrinking the whole ordeal to a scope so fragmented and subjective, it's a though you're reading about wandering, faceless spirits rather than human beings. The sense of genuine danger that would be ever-present in a displacement situation is pointedly muted. Like the author was worried that any kind of concrete tension would feel too Hollywood. In the end, I just wanted the world of the story to be a little more convincing.