There is a quarry made of meat, marbled rich with fat. There is a family who lives at the meat quarry’s edge. There is a girl who lives with a knotted body, as does her mother, as does her mother’s mother. There is a girl who yearns to be seen with kind eyes, to be touched with soft hands, to be lov ...more
Perfection of a kind. A musky odor emanates from every sentence, and each word seems meticulously chosen to evoke, mm, something like sanguinarian, or even coprophilic pleasure. This is ruthless, relentless, and visionary writing. The story could well mean more than its superficial meanings, I'm ope ...more
The Book of X follows Cassie, a girl who is born with her stomach literally twisted in a knot, from her childhood into her adult years. Cassie is raised on a meat farm, a piece of land with an enormous quarry where her father and brother ...more
this book is a lump in my throat! this book made me start crying out of nowhere! everything hurts!!! I wasn't sure how I felt about it until the last ~20 pages when my face starting leaking. the protagonist's relationship with her mother continues to wound me, maybe more so than anything else there ...more
I’m obsessed with this book! Sarah Rose Etter has shown how you can push fiction to its bounds, break through, and create a wonderful, eccentric blend of storytelling, surrealism, insight into the female experience, and visceral portrayals of humanity and the loneliness, pain, and longing that come ...more
This ended up on a few end of year lists - not a ton, but the few it did were well curated enough that this shot up my TBR list pretty quickly.
I read a bit of this last night, only having maybe 20 minutes of time available before exhaustion overwhelmed me. I was hooked quick, but very shallowly into ...more
This is a brilliant fabulist allegory about the ways in which women are taught to keep raw wounded experiences from bleeding though the sanitized mask of who they are and what they're worth. The imagery is surreal, edgy, poetic, and powerful. Women are encouraged to be incredibly self-aware (particu ...more