A review by casskrug
Billy and Girl by Deborah Levy

3.0

this was a straaaaange little book. the voice felt different for levy, lots of quirky choices with the tone she was using, which makes sense as the book follows two strange kids on their search to find their mother who has disappeared. there are supermarkets, robberies, kidnappings, and a lot of musings about pain and memory. billy and girl are telling themselves stories in order to cope with the reality of what happened to their family, projecting onto other people and trying to doctor them into who billy and girl are not as a means of survival. the themes of family felt reminiscent of august blue and brought to mind some of levy’s writing about her sense of home. where august blue felt too sparse too me, this almost verged on too colorful and abrasive. i went back and forth between having fun reading it and feeling put off-balance by it. 

in the grand scheme of levy’s fiction, i found this not quite as mind-blowingly weird as the man who saw everything, but far more successful in its mysteriousness than august blue. 

“Pain is as mysterious as love. A world of feeling and silence. Mood changes and sobbing. Both enter the body, love and pain often the same thing. Both cause profound change and even death. Biographies, symptoms, histories.“