Defenestrate by Renee Branum

​This was a book I selected almost entirely by the title, a word I strangely adore. Although, to be fair, the concept was also intriguing and the Czech Republic providing location as a character for a lot of the story was nice too.
      This is a story of a family that tends to have a…let’s say complicated relationship with gravity. They take tumbles and spills, they stumble and they careen. They believe themselves to be doomed by an ancient ancestral legend, but are they? Or is just life itself that causes them to fall, time and again?
       The story follows the main protagonists, twins named Marta and Nick, the youngest in their fall prone family line. After their highly religious mother banishes Nick upon finding out he’s gay, the twins relocate to Prague and find themselves drifting through the ancient city, failing to make any real connections outside of one another. And then Nick falls, like so many of his ancestors before him, and Marta stays by his side until he recuperates.
        And meanwhile both of them, especially Marta reminisces, heavily, about their past, their family’s past and so on. It’s a novel comprised of reminiscences, a rear view mirror of a novel primarily, a highly literary and almost poetic in style narrative of familial connections and quotidian disconnects of life.
        For some reason with a title and a cover being as they are, I expected a quirkier read. This wasn’t quirky. It was serious, heavy, somber. Much like the family in the book, the narrative had its own gravity, it seems. It invites you in and it glides along at a decent speed, strangely compelling, so that you can fall for it but not necessarily in love with it.
        It’s poignant, its sadness is lovely, but there’s a certain remove here, a distance between you and the characters, characters that are not exactly easy to emotionally engage with or even like. They have that special twin connection, that almost presupposes an exclusion of outsiders. They also take a really long time to figure their sh*t out, like proper millennials.
        Prague comes across as bleak and depressing. It might just be the twins projecting. Or it might be the old world’s weight as experienced by the new world tourists. Which is essentially what they are, Marta barely has enough language to get around, they stay, they graze, but they don’t engage.
        Overall, there’s a definitive loveliness to the style that might not always be there for the characters, the writing is so eloquent, so…writerly. It’s definitely a literary work and it knows it. It isn’t pompous with it, though. And every so often there’s an absolutely striking turn of phrase. There was one sentence that absolutely blew me away with its beauty. But overall, it wasn’t a blow you away book. An interesting literary family drama, certainly an accomplished debut, but kind of muted, too rambling, too meditative, too enamored with its own concept to properly wow.
       Much like a proper fall, though, it had a proper velocity and sped by very quickly. Thanks Netgalley.