A review by octavia_cade
Fosterling by Emma Neale

emotional sad slow-paced

4.0

Well this is a desperately sad book with which to start my reading year! Absolutely worth reading, despite the unhappy ending, though - and the unhappy beginning, and the unhappy middle. The awful thing about it is that it's all so plausible. A young man is found injured in the bush, and he is heavily deformed. So deformed, that his adoptive parents have tried to protect him by constant isolation from other people, and Bu has interpreted his own difference as a confronting form of otherness. He thinks that he's a yeti. (He may actually be a yeti.) And the media attention, the casual cruelties he faces, while trying to navigate a modern small city after an adolescence of near-total reclusion, pile up and pile up until the ending is largely inevitable. There are no answers, no happy ending... no ending at all, really. The best one can hope for Bu is the indifference of other people, and he doesn't even get that. As I said, it's desperately sad, but it's also very good. I've been meaning to read it for years, and I'm so glad that I finally have.