Mental illnesses like ____ create and hold definitions. Living with ____ is more of a slog than reading with it. ‘You were done, you were done, you were done with being hopeless.’ (329). Would that the doing could ever be so easy.
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In awe of writerly precision even more this second read, after loving the first bite of its hard honesty. ‘I tried to figure out if I felt calmer with a blanket over my head. No I did not was the answer’ (5).
A Crarcow of a novel. Proof that young adult is a porous category. This ghost story brings back the scariest moments of the past, reminds you they were never gone. Sleeping comes with a risk. Burn fires bright. Sing away the fright.
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A brilliant book flowing the politics of process philosophy through all the other body politic. ‘No body is undisturbed’ (35). Life, that ‘place between’, both ‘invisible and everywhere’ (352). Microbiology and memory, Australia and China, this read chokes while offering fresh air.
Some books get you in with the first line. The fifth, sixth and seventh got me. ‘The only lasting truth/Is Change/God is Change ‘ (3) With the sweltering truth of the then that is now, Earthseed: a living bible for these times.
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A story of a snake spirit 16,000 years old, born into a body who lives in ways that only others such as she can understand. (226). The truth: ‘the child of Ala is not, and can never be, intended for your hands.’
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Uncomfortable increasingly less sat-upon Pew wonders ‘why it was that anyone believed the human body needed to be any particular way, or what was so important about a human body’ (116). Wise Pew refuses to think ‘other people’s dreams are boring’ (112).
A swarm around gravestones and archives in the dodgy company of the haunted Lincolns. A swimmy mess of historical confabulation that preys on fears and half-alive mythologies and propaganda. Voices of poetry and prosy, ghostly prodding and all this with terrifying wit.
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‘The apartment had windows on all sides’ (1). Mothering under duress that presses through those windows and this life of a mother and toddler in a ‘two mat’ bedroom (16). Hard slaps, sleeping on a heartbeat, threaded with the shiver of dreams.
It’s all in the first epigraph. ‘”You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.” (Louise Bourgeois.) So many dream houses and (spoiler alert) only in the end, a dream home. Brilliant. It burns.
