Freshwater in Around the World in 80 Books

Mar 07, 2018 Nadine in NY Jones rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literary-schmiterary, 100-best-of-21st-c, fiction, gods-known-and-unknown, is-it-real-or-is-it-memorex, r2018-in-2018

This is all, ultimately, a litany of madness - the colors of it, the sounds it makes in heavy nights, the chirping of it across the shoulder of the morning. Think of brief insanities that are in you, not just the ones that blossomed as you grew into taller, more sinful versions of yourself, but the ones you were born with, tucked behind your liver. Take us, for instance.

This book was weird, and gorgeous, and confusing, and captivating. I loved it, but I feel like I didn't understand it.

It s

This is all, ultimately, a litany of madness - the colors of it, the sounds it makes in heavy nights, the chirping of it across the shoulder of the morning. Think of brief insanities that are in you, not just the ones that blossomed as you grew into taller, more sinful versions of yourself, but the ones you were born with, tucked behind your liver. Take us, for instance.

This book was weird, and gorgeous, and confusing, and captivating. I loved it, but I feel like I didn't understand it.

It starts with a bang. I just love a killer opening line.

The first time our mother came for us, we screamed.

We were three, and she was a snake, coiled up on the tile in the bathroom, waiting.

Most of the time I was reading this I absolutely did not know what to make of it, and I was reading it just to see where the author was going with this craziness. I enjoyed it, but I was so confused. It reminded me very much of Running, I felt the same way while reading that book, and if you liked one you should read the other. Both books feature an emotionally broken young woman who had just said fuck it to society's dictates, she is following a moral code all her own.

It was hard for me to know what to make of this. Is it fantasy? magical realism? an allegory describing mental illness?? Each time I finally settle on one possibility, I change my mind. Was this book all the things???? I think maybe it was.

The final page was gorgeous, and I have to include it here, I'm spoiler tagging, but it's not really a spoiler.

(view spoiler)

ETA: I was startled to learn that this novel is very autobiographical: My surgeries were a bridge across realities ...more

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