Review by thebookishalibi - Our Last Wild Days

thebookishalibi 's review for:

Our Last Wild Days by Anna Bailey

5.0

dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

OUR LAST WILD DAYS is all heart and edges, both grace and grit. It’s a book about forgiveness and about the unforgivable. It’s clever and deeply moving and brilliantly written.

Loyal May is coming home to rural Louisiana to care for her ailing mother. She left Jacknife a decade ago to forget the crumbling of her closest friendship with local rebel Cutter Labasque. Her homecoming is marked by the discovery of that best friend, facedown and drowned in the polluted water. Loyal can’t shake her need to make things right with her old friend - her name is fitting, it turns out - and she sets out to find out what happened.

Anna Bailey’s writing is a kind of gothic poetry. Their ability to create a real sense of place and people with words is something to behold. You can feel the damp of the bayou on your neck, feel the weight of the humidity. And these characters - oof. They put all of themselves into creating these full, flawed, beautiful human beings. (“Cutter is a crowbar of a woman”, they write, and I immediately knew this character entirely.)

To put it simply, this book is why we read. To feel things. To go somewhere else, places that are unfamiliar and yet still feel like they could be home. To see the people we know, and sometimes ourselves, reflected back to us in fiction and to remember something about being human.

And just to say, “a nazi ain’t a man” was precisely the proclamation I needed from a book right now.

Thank you to Atria Books for the advance copy. All opinions are entirely my own.

Content Warnings