I read this book because I had read and loved an essay written by the author called The Crane Wife. This was the book that she had been researching as part of the trip described in the essay, and while I don't know what I was anticipating from the novel, it definitely wasn't what it was? But I still really enjoyed it.
It's hard to know how to describe the book - it's probably closest to magical realism, but it's also a book about family secrets, and about what secrets do to people, and about the taboos that people want desperately to violate, just to see that we can. It's also about a cult on a small island off the Gulf Coast of the U.S., and the sense of a world that has stopped moving forward and is instead falling backwards, and the appeal of an escape to a new world. It's about a woman whose father has died, a scientist who threw his life away after moving to this small island to do research, and who either killed himself or died in an accident, and the research he left behind. She goes there, extremely unwillingly, with her younger half-brother, someone she hadn't seen in ten years.
There's a tension in the writing between what the characters know, and what the reader does, and also what the characters don't know, and the reader suspects but cannot prove. I read the whole book on a train ride from Boston to New York, and I think it's a book that probably benefits from being read in one sitting: I felt contained by it, like the reality of the story was the only reality that was real, and yet completely impossible to understand.
Grade: B
It's hard to know how to describe the book - it's probably closest to magical realism, but it's also a book about family secrets, and about what secrets do to people, and about the taboos that people want desperately to violate, just to see that we can. It's also about a cult on a small island off the Gulf Coast of the U.S., and the sense of a world that has stopped moving forward and is instead falling backwards, and the appeal of an escape to a new world. It's about a woman whose father has died, a scientist who threw his life away after moving to this small island to do research, and who either killed himself or died in an accident, and the research he left behind. She goes there, extremely unwillingly, with her younger half-brother, someone she hadn't seen in ten years.
There's a tension in the writing between what the characters know, and what the reader does, and also what the characters don't know, and the reader suspects but cannot prove. I read the whole book on a train ride from Boston to New York, and I think it's a book that probably benefits from being read in one sitting: I felt contained by it, like the reality of the story was the only reality that was real, and yet completely impossible to understand.
Grade: B
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