skeeffe 's review for:

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson
2.0

There isn't a lot to Everything Under. The plot is too thin and the characters too shallow to sustain a novel. With just twenty pages left to be read, I had become so ground down and uninterested that I almost stopped reading. I forced myself to finish it, and, in hindsight, I would have been better off putting it down and never picking it back up again.

Johnson is clearly a talented writer of prose and I admired much of her imagery and expression. Unfortunately, these writerly flourishes are mired in a book that felt overlong at just 260 pages. The occasional pretty sentence does not compensate for a book that otherwise feels void of life and direction.