🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

A very strange book, and one that is so unique it is virtually guaranteed to evoke strong feelings in the reader – as this is a book that will challenge as much as it enthralls.

Narrated by a voice that is ageless, unnamed, and only very loosely described as female and of Jewish descent, this is a stream-of-consciousness read that plays with time and space and location, excludes the idea of plot, and essentially gives us the often beautiful, maddeningly incomprehensible ramblings of our main ( that is to say, only) protagonist. The reader can only see the world through her eyes, and a very meager world it is, where not much happens, and all of it is at least to some level, impenetrable.

The youngest in a very large family, raised to be servile to her siblings, our narrator hints at emotional, physical, and even sexual abuse, all placidly taken in stride as she outlines her lot in life and where it takes her. Or is this placidity a ruse, her true emotional state unknowable to even the narrator herself?

Ending up in a “northern country” performing housekeeping and personal care duties for her affluent and blithely despotic brother, alienated from the townspeople, (who seem to fear her), our narrator appears to self-reflect on both her alienation, her feeble female nature and her inbred shortcomings, but remains trapped in her own meta-consciousness.

With twinges of both Shirley Jackson, and dystopian Margaret Atwood (“Alias Grace” comes to mind), as the “creepy” factor surrounding her life in the form of strange circumstances in the village farming life grows, it’s not clear if our narrator is after all, complicit, innocent or an agent, “both obedient and murderous”, of what appear to be acts of demonic origin or witchery, directed against the natural order.

I absolutely loved this read, though it’s complexity renders it perhaps not the best choice for my current Covid 19-addled brain. Regardless, this is a book that will require rereading (I look forward to it).

A great big thank you to the publisher and the author for a beautiful ARC. All thoughts presented are my own.