kelscanread 's review for:

Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward
4.75
This was truly such a mindfuck of a book, in the best way possible. Catriona Ward delicately weaves a story of multiple perspectives, making you question and doubt in the end whose story was true. As someone on Reddit said, it’s a tug of war between stolen and shared narratives of the same story. 

To my understanding, we’re all reading Pearl’s second book called “Looking Glass Sound”. Pearl goes by multiple names, including Sky, Skye, Skander, and Pearl. Sky is the name Wilder gives Pearl in his own memoir “The Dagger Man on Whistler Bay”, and Skander is the name Pearl goes by in her first published book “The Sound and the Dagger“. Skye is the name Pearl goes by in her second book, “Looking Glass Sound” which is her writing in Wilder’s perspective. Pearl writes as if he is writing in response to her first published book “The Sound and the Dagger”, which details how she [as Sky] stole Wilder’s unpublished memoir, blended her own narrative, and inserted herself as Skander. It isn’t until the end that we realize that we’ve been reading Pearl’s second book, and we then realize that she has been Sky/Skander/Skye all along.


There were so many hidden twists that I had to go back and look for the chapters that had [ ] as the title.
We later find out that Harper accidentally killed Wilder, and her magic spell inserts Wilder into “The Sound and the Dagger,” unbeknownst to Pearl herself. The rules of the word game is that the last words of each grouping of words must spell out a sentence. Each chapter’s word game spells out “What where am I,” “Don’t let her [Harper] see Grace”, “help”, “Don't trust her, don't trust them, help, help, help”, and “You are here too.” I‘m guessing this is Wilder trying to warn Pearl in the book she wrote. Cool huh?


Even though I had to sort out the book in my head after I read it, I do want to keep reading more of Ward‘s books. Her writing style flows, her storytelling is enchanting, and not once did I put this book down out of boredom. I‘d also re-read this book again just for clarity and read some of her other novels as well.