What a magnificently disturbing nightmare of a story!
You know what else is magnificent here? A reminder that people CAN surprise you. I mean, I would have never selected this book solely based on the romcom garbage the author had churned out before. But lo and behold, she turns around (a full 180) and produces this darkness-personified of a story—a portrait of psychopath as a young woman, if you will. Actually, I selected this book based on its award-winning status and praise from respectable sources. And yeah, totally worth it. A one-sit read, a mesmerizingly, viscerally disturbing book. It pulls you into its darkness slowly. The first 20% or so it just descriptions of the island where the story takes place—this is very much as location-as-character story. We don’t meet Rachel, the character who becomes a sort of catalyst for the plot until nearly 30%. The thing is, the author absolutely has the chops to work with a leisurely pace; her descriptions are cinematically vivid. The island comes to life as a forbidding rock populated by narrow-minded, superstitious, insular people who shun the protagonist, Aoileann, and have done so for all her nineteen years on earth. She has never left the island, never been to school, all she knows of the world is what she’s read in books. Aoileann’s entire life is dedicated to (with her grandmother) taking care of her mother who has been in a vegetative state more or less since Aoileann was born. This care is described in exhaustive, visceral detail to show you just how much of a nightmare the situation is. To make matters worse (and give the situation a slightly surreal atmosphere),at night, her mother apparently crawls around, etching letters into the floor with her bare fingers. When Rachel (with her newborn) shows up on the island for a temporarily artistic residency, Aoileann sees a window into a larger world open and grabs at it for dear life. It becomes a sort of toxic obsession where she can’t quite tell if she wants Rachel for a lover or a mother, but she wants Rachel and will stop at nothing to get her. Absolutely harrowing journey into a warped mind. Very well done. It seems the story had been reworked and expanded from the original, going by descriptions alone, and more importantly, it works. Sure, yeah, it checks A LOT of the current gotta-have-it boxes along the way: a tale of motherhood, mothers/daughters dynamics, reverential treatment of body fat, queer tones, etc. but it does so in a way that never seems gratuitous and really works within the story. It isn’t a fun read by any means, nor will it work for everyone, but it would be a deranged delight for connoisseurs of dark psychological fiction. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.
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