A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

This is actually a sequel to both the book and the TV show The Handmaid's Tale, rather like the movie Doctor Sleep is a sequel to both Stephen King's book and Stanley Kubrick's movie of The Shining.

The Testaments takes place about fifteen years after the end of The Handmaid's Tale (the book), and is narrated by three characters with three intersecting plotlines. One is Aunt Lydia, in Gilead. One is a young woman in Gilead, Agnes. One is a teenage girl in Canada, Daisy.

Aunt Lydia recounts how she ended up in Gilead - she was a judge who was tortured and broken along with a lot of other professional women. This is the part that feels the most like a genuine sequel to The Handmaid's Tale - it's horrifying and visceral and insightful.

However, a big part of what was so good about the book The Handmaid's Tale was how small-scale it was: rebellion was inner thoughts and scratchings on a closet wall. In The Testaments, rebellion is YA dystopia-style secret missions.

Cut for spoilers that are revealed very early on. ( Read more... )

Agnes is the daughter of a Handmaid adopted by a Commander and his wife. The most interesting part of her life is that there is genuine love between her and her adoptive/kidnapper mother. But Agnes herself is kind of a blank slate. She's writing from the perspective of having turned against Gilead but still defending it a little bit, which sounds more interesting than I actually found it. She ends up becoming a trainee Aunt under Aunt Lydia.

Daisy is a shallow, annoying teenager whose parents are murdered, whereupon she discovers that she is more important than she ever knew. If you've seen the TV series you know who she is. I did not like her, and I REALLY did not like her storyline, which read very much like a YA dystopia circa Divergent and all the others where some teenage girl discovers that she's super important to the rebellion despite having no actual qualifications. She is sent to Gilead on an incredibly important mission despite being literally the worst possible person to do it, and also despite it being the sort of thing that any random rebel could have done. She proceeds to be the worst secret agent ever, but ( Read more... )

The whole book is beautifully written on a prose level, unsurprisingly. But only Aunt Lydia's narrative is compelling. Agnes doesn't have a whole lot of personality other than being brainwashed and then de-brainwashed, and Daisy is the kind of YA heroine that makes people stereotype YA books as being shallow and bad. And I just didn't like ( Read more... )

I felt like The Testaments was unsatisfying both as a sequel to the book (nowhere near as good) and the TV series (depressing when you consider ( Read more... ) That being said, Ann Dowd is going to absolutely kill it in the TV version.

Owning a bookshop is GREAT for reading extremely new books.

Title notwithstanding, nothing supernatural happens in this novel. A much more appropriate, though less cool, title would be Self-Reliance, which is both the name of the summer camp where much of the book takes place and a quality frequently evoked by the characters in varying contexts.

God of the Woods is partly a mystery and partly a family saga about a wealthy family who has two children disappear, a son aged eight in 1961 and a daughter aged thirteen in 1975 at a summer camp they founded. It's also the story of a second-generation Polish immigrant who's the only female investigator on the police force, the lesbian camp leader whose family is intricately tied to that of the vanished girl's, the other girls and their counselors at the camp, the many people who become collateral damage of the investigations, and, almost incidentally, a serial killer who - coincidentally? - is on the loose during both disappearances.

This is a kind of book which I often enjoy but have not read many of recently, an immersive historical with a large cast, lots of details of place and culture, and many characters all trying to forge their place in the world under difficult circumstances. In this case, it's all wrapped around a central mystery or possibly a pair of them - one of the big questions is whether the two disappearances are connected. The mysteries are nicely constructed and do get satisfying solutions, though ones which probably put the book more in the "literary fiction" shelf rather than "mystery." They do have clues and are at least partially solvable in advance, but the nature of what happened feels more "fiction" than "mystery."

I was most captivated by the story of Barbara, the punk vanished girl, whose parents neglect her when they're not trying to force her into a mold she doesn't fit; her painfully shy bunkmate Tracey, who has her own problems at home; their counselor Louise, who makes a number of extremely bad decisions because she's so desperate to escape poverty; and Judyta, the second-generation Polish-American investigator who has to manage hostile co-workers and supervisors, parents who think they know best, and her own insecurities and inexperience.

Alice, Barbara's mother, is not a particularly nice person but when we see what she went through in the fifties, which is basically every bad thing that could happen to rich white women in the fifties, it's deeply tragic. Judyta's hopes for the future, in 1975 when it looks like things are really breaking open for women, come across as a lot more sad now than I think the author intended.

In particular, [big spoiler] ( Read more... )

Recommended if you like this sort of thing. It feels to me like it's in the same genre as The Secret History, though it has a completely different tone.

Content notes: domestic violence, emotional abuse, period-typical homophobia and misogyny, child death, addiction, hunting for food, extremely heartbreaking depiction of mother-child separation and socially enforced bad parenting. There's zero details on the serial killings; the killer is plot-relevant but that's it.

A novel by an... I'll just copy Wikipedia here, because I can't improve on it... American adventurer, dogsled racer, musher, advice columnist and nonfiction writer. She raced and completed the 2019 Iditarod, the 1,000 mi (1,600 km) dogsled race from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska. Publishers Weekly called Braverman a "21st century feminist reincarnation of Jack London."

Relevantly for this book, she appeared on the survival reality show Naked and Afraid.

Small Game is about the four contestants of a reality survivor show, Civilization, who get stranded when the crew disappears without explanation.

(Spoiler for whether or not we learn why - I got accidentally spoiled for this, and I think it's better to know up-front: ( Read more... ))

Mara, the main character, was raised by paranoid survivalists and got a job teaching survival to techbros and other bros, as it's the only thing she knows. In addition to having extremely limited social experience, she's probably autistic, or at least I read her that way. She applies for the show because she's in a bad relationship and needs money to escape. Her voice and way of seeing things is very striking; while her emotional and personal horizons expand a lot during the novel, she stays her essential self.

Small Game is notable partly for what doesn't happen: it's not Lord of the Flies. The survivors don't turn on each other, and there's no rape. (In fact, the sexual danger vanishes when the crew leaves, as that removes the power dynamics based on financial control and exploitation.) There's social awkwardness, and interpersonal blowups, and emotional breakdowns, and tragedy. But there's also kindness and community and mutual support.

It's an unusually realistic take on wilderness survival, in that even supposed experts are going to really struggle to get enough calories, and weakness from hunger quickly makes even small tasks incredibly difficult. There's a lot of interesting thoughts on what survival means.

The ending is very abrupt and I'd have been pissed off if I hadn't been spoiled for the thing I spoiler-tagged, but I did like the last paragraph.

I enjoyed this a lot and recommend it, especially if you're interested in survival. Also it has a central F/F relationship that runs the gamut from sweet to unsettling to unhealthy to heartbreaking to heartwarming, with everything in between.

Content notes: Creepy sexual power dynamics involving the crew and producers; off-page power-related dubcon; an upsetting, kind of unintentional animal harm incident; lots of nature red in tooth and claw; gruesome injuries; spoiler ( Read more... )

You can tell from this that this is a book that really goes for complication, fucked-up characters, and not making anything black-and-white. That's another thing I liked about it.

"I wonder," she paused, "if you'd nothing to think about but yourself for days and days I wonder what you'd find out about yourself--"

One of six non-mystery novels written by Christie under the Mary Westmacott pseudonym. This is the first I've read. Christie wrote it in three days and thought it was one of her best novels.

Middle-aged wife and mother Joan Scudamore is passing through Iraq on her way back from a visit with her grown daughter when a flood strands her at a rest stop for a week with absolutely nothing to do. There's no other guests, she hates the food, she's hardly going to converse with the staff, there's nothing to see but desert, and she only has three books. With no other alternatives, she looks back on her life and slowly begins to realize truths about it and her that she refused to see or admit to before.

( Read more... )

While not a genre mystery, Absent in the Spring does have a central mystery - what is the truth about Joan? - and a sequence of reveals. It's very technically accomplished. It's not a fun book like a lot of Christie's mysteries as Joan is so awful and we're relentlessly inside her head, but it's interesting and I can see why Christie herself liked it. It was a very difficult concept to pull off and she pulls it off.

Christie scale: A single but HAIR-RAISING bit of anti-Semitism. A single but HAIR-RAISING bit of "rape: it does a woman good." MEDIUM amounts of racism.

I loved this book so much that it was difficult to review. It was one of my favorites of all the books I read for Bouchercon. (My other favorites were Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland by S. A. Cosby and Winter Counts by David Heska Wambli Weiden.)

I would never have read this book if it hadn't been for Bouchercon, as the blurb did not make it sound like something I'd enjoy. It's about the only Black woman working in a low-level publishing job when another Black woman joins the company, and the blurb was all about office politics, social satire, and racism. I really don't like stories about office politics, social satire is extremely hit-or-miss for me, and I'm a hard sell on stories about women fighting each other for scraps.

The Other Black Girl may be the only book I've ever enjoyed that's largely about office politics. However, Harris worked in a publishing house for years, and that happens to be a business I'm familiar with, so the specifics of the office and its politics were dead-on. There's a major plotline about an acclaimed white writer whose very important American novel about the opioid crisis includes a Black addict named Shartricia which is at once darkly hilarious and infuriating.

But it's about so much more than office politics. This book is a wild ride. It uses multiple timelines and POVs to achieve gasp-worthy moments that reminded me of Catriona Ward's The Girl From Rawblood. The structure alone is incredibly skillful and fun to read.

It also achieves the thing I wanted and missed in The Collective, which is a real exploration of moral dilemmas involved in doing something revolutionary. Most books dodge that by picking someone as a villain who doesn't even believe in the goals, and dumping all the bad actions on them. The Other Black Girl doesn't do that. There's villains, but not that sort, and there's people making actual morally ambiguous choices.

Looking at the blurb now, I see that either I missed the headline or they added a new one which gives you a better idea of where it's going. It was a lot of fun for me to go in completely cold, but given that most of you are probably also not into office politics...

( spoilers for premise, which you don't learn until about halfway through )

The Other Black Girl is a very original, cross-genre, hard to categorize book with elements of suspense, literary fiction, horror, satire, social commentary, and SFF. It's emotional and funny and very thought-provoking. The central metaphor really worked for me.

The book goes full meta on its readers in a scene where two Black women are talking about hair in an elevator with a white woman. One of the Black women imagines the white woman googling hair terms like "kitchen" and "4C." I felt called out as the white woman watching, I laughed, I googled. (I did know that 4C was a curl type, but not which one; I did not know "kitchen" in hair terms.)

Though this wasn't a book that was written for me, and I'm sure there was lots that went over my head completely, it was a book that got to me on a very personal level. Sometimes you love something in a way that goes beyond how objectively good something is, and I felt this way about The Other Black Girl, though it is in fact objectively good. I'm not Black and my experience of being the only woman in the room or the only Jew in the room is very different from that of being the only Black woman in the room. But this book really spoke to me, both in terms of what it was about and how it was written.

( spoilers for the entire book )

I was legit shocked that this didn't win the Anthony for best first novel, as it was far and away the best on that ballot and I'd have agonized if I'd had to pick between it and Razorblade Tears, which won best novel. The actual winner for best first novel was Arsenic and Adobo, which was an above-average cozy in a fun setting, and which I enjoyed but come on.

Black writers writing about racism were very well-represented on both the ballot and in winners overall, so I don't think that was the issue. Maybe some voters thought it was too weird, some thought it wasn't really a mystery or suspense novel (fair), and some really wanted to reward something light and fun. But come on.

ETA: I checked the reviews on Amazon and I get it now. This was a really polarizing book, and a lot of people hated the central conceit. They are objectively wrong. But yeah, I think "too weird" was the key issue.

Content notes: Depictions of the subtler kinds of racism throughout. A lot of uncomfortably relatable moments of workplace humiliation, tension, micro-aggressions, gaslighting, etc.

Spoilers for the entire book are fine in comments! You don't need to use rot.13. If you don't want to be spoiled, don't read the comments.

A white, upper-middle class New York family rents a house on Long Island for a vacation weekend. While they're there, the owners of the house return. They're a wealthy Black couple who explain that they had to come back because something's wrong in New York City--power and internet is out, and no one knows exactly what's going on. The two families end up living in the house together as they slowly begin to realize that what happened will change the world and their lives forever.

Leave the World Behind is an extremely, extremely literary mainstream version of a post-apocalypse novel. It has a strong element of social satire, and is almost entirely populated by characters who are basically the New Yorker's supposedly humorous"Shouts and Murmors" column come to life:

Amanda did the New York Times crossword on her phone—she was afraid of dementia, and felt this was preventative—and the time passed strangely, as it did when measured in minutes before the television.

All the characters are incredibly self-conscious 100% of the time:

Clay returned with a surprising number of paper bags.

“I went a little overboard.” He looked sheepish. “I thought it might rain. I don’t want to have to leave the house tomorrow.”

Amanda frowned because she felt she was supposed to. It wouldn’t ruin them to spend a little more than was usual on groceries. Or maybe it was the wine. “Fine, fine. Put those away and let’s eat?” She wasn’t sure she wasn’t slurring a little bit.

Race issues, and white people's hypocrisy thereof, are a major part of the novel:

Jocelyn, of Korean parentage, had been born in South Carolina, and Amanda continued to feel that the woman's mealy-mouthed accent was incongruous. This was so racist she could never admit it to anyone.

I have all these excerpts to give you a sense of the very distinctive writing style, which is a big reason why the book has won a ton of awards. I found it simultaneously deeply obnoxious, extremely accomplished at doing what the author wants it to do, and bizarrely compelling. I read the entire book in an evening, when I had expected to DNF somewhere around chapter one.

A number of reviews by ordinary readers, as opposed to critics, were very frustrated by the lack of explanation of what the apocalypse was. I was the opposite: I would have liked certain aspects to be explained less. The novel is written in omniscient, God-level POV, so we occasionally get explanations of what's going on or glimpses of what happens elsewhere. This is well-done in itself, but for me the book was strongest when the apocalypse consists of incredibly eerie things happening with no one having any idea of what they are.

At one point a terrible sound occurs, causing glasses to crack and people to collapse. This sound isn't a bang or a sonic boom or anything anyone can describe, and is so alien from anything anyone has ever heard before that it jars them all out of their denial that something both terrible and worldshaking has happened.

We eventually get an explanation of the sound, and it's both anti-climactic and raises a lot of "But wait a second..." type of questions. ( Read more... )

The last chapter of the book is excellent, and for me a very satisfying conclusion. It's open-ended and mysterious, but in a fitting way, and it does end the book on a note that makes it feel like a story has been completed. I have to note that many readers did not like the ending at all and thought the book just stopped.

This isn't really my kind of book, but I liked it a lot more than I expected, even while every sentence made me think "ugh I HATE these people" and "ugh this sentence makes my skin crawl." It captures an aspect of contemporary life that I HATE in a very stylized and artificial manner that I HATE, and yet it's very well-done. I wouldn't ever read anything else by Alam, but I don't think the people who gave this book its awards were wrong.

I'm going to keep on skipping "Shouts and Murmurs" though.

Now THIS is the book I’ve been waiting for from Tartt after the frustrating disappointment of The Little Friend. This is an old-school sprawling epic about trauma, grief, art, love, denial, and much, much more. After a slow start, I ended up extremely emotionally engaged and look forward to requesting it for Yuletide.

If you liked The Secret History, you will probably like this; if you didn’t, you probably won’t. Though the plots and most of the characters are completely different, the narrative voice is similar and there’s a hard-to-pin-down feel that’s also similar. If Richard Papen drove you up the wall, Theo Decker probably will too.

When the book begins, Theo is a Manhattan teenager living with his beloved mother after his abusive father skipped town, to their relief. His life is shattered when his mother dies under extremely traumatizing circumstances, propelling Theo into a series of different milieus to which he takes his troubles with him.

I read this mostly unspoiled, which was a very rewarding experience, so I’m putting the rest of the plot below a cut. Above the cut, I will just note a few things which readers might want to know about in advance.

Content notes: The dog lives. There is significant gay/bisexual content though a lot of the usual questions that brings up (“Canon or subtext?” “Do they survive?” “Is it a happily ever after?”) are hard to answer due to spoilery/complicated in-book circumstances. There is a lot of addiction, suicidality, and non-sexual child abuse/neglect.

Also, there are Russian characters who I am going to guess are probably not very accurate as I cannot recall a single instance of Russians I know thinking a book by a non-Russian author was accurate.

osprey_archer just reviewed this; if you’ve read it, feel free to jump into the discussion in her comments.

( Read more... )

The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

When Dolores Claiborne becomes a suspect in the death of Vera Donovan, for whom she'd been a paid companion, she sits down at the police station and confesses to the murder of... her own husband, many years ago.

I have a lot of difficulty reading any kind of dialect-type narration, so I bounced off this repeatedly before trying the audio version - which was perfect, as the book is written in the form of a monologue. Once I was over that hump, the book was engrossing and moving. It's got elements of suspense and mystery, but it's mostly a character portrait of Dolores, Vera Donovan, and their relationship, which feels incredibly real.

Early on Dolores keeps referring to Vera as "that bitch." The way that gets recontextualized as the story goes on, accreting layers of meaning and emotion, is just beautifully orchestrated. It's a story about two very specific women who have a lot of flaws and unlikable aspects, but are also human and lovable in a way that nobody has ever seen but each other. Dolores Claiborne gives you a God's eye view of them in all their grossness and pettiness and endurance and heroism and love.

Dolores Claiborne

You may perhaps have noticed that I enjoy reading trashy dated novels. No apologies.

I spotted this... somewhere... and having never seen the movie but having enjoyed some of Gallico's other books, I grabbed it and finally got around to reading it. Gallico has a compulsively readable quality for me that many better authors lack, and this book had that in spades. It also satisfied my need for a motley party of people surviving (or not) an unusual and vivid deadly catastrophe. And it even had a heroic Jewish woman, which I was not expecting and enjoyed despite the way she was written, which was... okay so I mentioned that this was dated and trashy.

The Poseidon, a luxury cruise ship whose captain has an unfortunate habit of cutting corners on safety, is sailing through a seasick-making storm when an underwater earthquake flips it over. The handful of passengers who aren't seasick and so are having lunch rather than in their cabins must ascend through the upside down ship, up upside down staircases and other obstacles, to reach the hull in the hope that any rescuers will be able to get to them before the ship sinks.

When I was a child, I used to lie on my back on the floor, looking up at the ceiling and imagining exploring the place I was in if it turned upside down. I used to imagine it if everything miraculously stuck to where it was, rather than behaving the way it really would if gravity still worked. The Poseidon Adventure is about how it would work if gravity did still work, but was nonetheless very satisfying to the part of me that still wants to explore an upside down world.

What makes it trashy: Oh, man, where do I even start? The book was published in 1969, and it feels regressive even for then. Every stereotype and offensive word possible flies thick and fast, there's a ton of "We made a two-second effort to convince these people to come with us and they stared at us while obviously still in shock, guess we'll just leave them to die then," a rape followed by the raped girl hoping she got pregnant (this kind of makes sense in context BUT STILL), screaming harridans, cheatin' husbands, sex in the middle of a giant pile of pastries, and an extremely strange minister who views God as a football coach - that's not my joke, that is totally literal.

But let me talk about Belle Rosen, my favorite character. Belle is a hugely fat old Jewish woman, terribly out of shape and not up to the rigors of the journey, who makes multiple attempts to just sit down and die in peace. She's married to Manny Rosen (also old and fat), and they own a deli and have kids and grandkids that she grumps about. She's often referred to as "the fat Jewess," mostly by a very unsympathetic character but also by some others, and much is made of how she's fat, fat, FAT.

She also has the only truly happy, honest, and loving relationship in the entire book. She and her husband are still madly in love and very tender with each other. While everyone else is being nonstop horrible to each other and wasting precious time arguing, being mean, getting into battles of the egos, etc, she is consistently nice, supportive, and sensible. She points out that all this bickering is a waste of time and everyone should just suck it up and cooperate, and then she puts her money where her mouth is.

And! Spoiler: ( Read more... )

Content notes: Child death, rape, wildly offensive in every possible way.

I have never seen the movie; should I hunt it down? Does it do a good job with the upside-down staircases and Belle Rosen, which would be my main reasons for watching?

ETA: There's three movies! There's the 1972 movie, which is the one I'd heard of, starring Gene Hackman as Reverend God Is My Football Coach, Ernst Borgnine as the asshole cop, Leslie Nielsen as the captain and apparent inspiration for the Airplane! movies, and Shelley Winters as Belle Rosen. There's Poseidon, a 2006 film directed by Wolfgang Peterson, which has Andre Braugher in it but I can't tell how big a role he has as the characters all have different names. And there's a 2005 TV movie which has Rutger Hauer, but I again can't tell in how big a role as the characters are changed (and the captain is named Paul Gallico!) Anyone seen any of these?

Please no comments along the lines of "I am a superior person who only reads actual good literature, unlike you." It's the judginess that annoys me. "Haha, that sounds hilaribad" is fine.

The Poseidon Adventure

Enjoy three covers in decreasing order of classiness.

This blisteringly intense novel is one of the best books I’ve read all year. It’s a character portrait in gorgeous prose, has elements of magical realism and suspense thriller, and was impossible for me to put down once I’d started. (It’s short enough to read in one sitting.) So I’ll put off the plot description for a moment.

A lot of people have said recently that they only want fluffy escapism right now. I completely understand that, and if so, definitely avoid this as it's the opposite of that. For me there’s always a fine line between stories so closely aligned with the most upsetting aspects of the world or my life that I can’t tolerate them, and stories that deal with them in a way that’s cathartic, makes me feel less alone and more hopeful, and is exactly what I want and need at that moment. For me, So Lucky was the latter.

Mara Tagarelli works for an HIV/AIDS nonprofit, is a serious martial artist, and is in a 14-year relationship with a woman named Rose. Then, one day, Rose leaves her, and she trips over nothing and falls. Shortly afterward, she’s diagnosed with MS, and in very short order loses her job, her ability to do karate, most of her social life, and all of her life as she knew it.

Because many individuals, the medical establishment, and society in general are absolutely terrible to people with chronic illnesses and disabilities, she starts a new nonprofit for people with MS. But she’s stalked by something that may be a hallucination (she’s taking medication that could cause that, and also has lesions on her brain) or her illness given physical form and malevolence or the criminals who have been robbing and murdering people with MS.

Whether or not they’re after her, those criminals are undoubtedly real… and when Mara investigates their crimes, she comes up with a disturbing theory that might be key to catching them. But who listens to an angry sick woman?

This novel captures justified female rage like little I’ve read before. I’ve been that angry sick woman who everyone ignores and disbelieves. Maybe you can’t live on anger alone, but women are told so automatically that they’re not allowed to be angry at all that it was very satisfying to read about Mara’s fury, along with her fear and helplessness and determination and refusal to be the meek docile patient that everyone wants her to be.

She hates being sick, she hates being in a body that feels terrible all the time, she hates losing the ability to do things she loved, she hates the way people act like utter assholes if you’re sick or disabled, and she refuses to be ashamed about any of that. And if she’s really on to something about those murders, she’s not going to let herself be brushed off until she gets to the bottom of it.

The book isn’t all anger – she also gets an adorable kitten and some new human connections – but it tosses the usual disability/illness narratives out the window, starting with the ones about how you’re supposed to be grateful for all it has to teach you and for giving you a new appreciation for the things that really matter (nature of those things unclear, given that your illness/other people's reactions to your illness/your reactions to your illness have destroyed not only everything you love in life but also the relationships that are supposed to be your support in this difficult time), how you're supposed to love your new body (that used to supply you with good feelings but now supplies you only with pain, nausea, and weakness), with a detour to the obligatory support group that are supposed to be helpful and supportive but are instead incredibly depressing.

Mara is extremely self-sufficient, and creates some of her own problems by trying to stay that way as it gets increasingly impossible. But when you've already lost everything, is it worthwhile to make your life easier by giving up the last thing you have left, which is the core component of your very self?

I found the book hugely cathartic. Sometimes when things suck, what you really want is for other people to just admit that they suck. Attitudes to illness remind me sometimes of the story of the Fisher King, who had a wound that could not be healed until someone asked him what was wrong.

We're so stuck in illness narratives, each neatly and arbitrarily tailored to a particular disease, that leave no room for individual people's feelings or identities or even the individual process of their illness.

Breast cancer? PINK! Yay female power! Buy pink stuff! Stop crying about it, it's just a breast. Be strong!

All cancer: Fight fight fight! If you're afraid you might die, you're giving in, and then if you do die it's your fault. Fight fight fight!

AIDS: We have drugs now! Just take care of yourself like if you had diabetes, no one dies of that any more.

MS/CFE: Shut up, crazy woman, you're not really sick. See a psychiatrist.

Anything hard to diagnose with 100% compliance to the strict diagnostic criteria in the manual: Shut up, crazy woman, you're not really sick. See a psychiatrist.

I could go on, but So Lucky isn't really about that, though it does touch on the differences between illness communities. It's mostly about looking into the abyss and giving it the finger.

If that's the mood you're in right now, So Lucky is for you. It’s beautifully written, suspenseful, uncompromising, unpredictable, and has a very satisfying ending. It also has a great cover and is a very nice physical object (the image doesn’t do it justice), so if that’s a consideration I would get the hard copy rather than the ebook.

So Lucky