TLDR; The story is captivating, the writing is fabulous! Wow, wowowow. I’m not usually one to talk to myself while I read but multiple verbal “WHAT”s and “uh oh..”s were uttered. Hella queer people!? (yayyy). Highly recommend!!!

Ok so I, for one, cannot believe it’s a debut novel, but it’s written by a poet, so. Our main character is self-loathing in a tolerable, understandable sort of way. Almost all of the other characters basically feel like supporting characters, which is particularly interesting because the story is also told from their POV and those chapters are not by any means, in my opinion, pointless asides from the story. I hear other people’s critiques that ~this doesn’t feel like a cohesive story, it’s disjointed~ and frankly, I do not agree at all. It is not told in a straight line, that is true. But I do not think it lacks anything it needs and I do think that the way that the story is told (there’s a current-day storyline with interspersed stories from other people from other points in the past) builds out the relevant relationships in a way that couldn’t be done otherwise. The bulk of the current-day story happens over, like, a week.

There are several really lovely ideas that I keep coming back to and turning over, and I LOVE getting that from a fiction book! Particularly the way it describes the interplay between grace and luck and dedication, and the hollowness of the body and how we fill it. I immediately want to re-read the book. The last 50 pages are so beautiful that I feel like I probably read over things too quickly in the beginning. If you’re like ‘whaddaya mean?’, go to chapter 31 and skip the first paragraph (it won’t spoil anything major but it might change the way you see a relationship too early imo), and read just those three pages.

Gods, I hope we see more novels from Kaveh Akbar in the future!

slippery mallow