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bretts_book_stack's review
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
3.5
In some respects I really don’t know what the hell I just read. As I attempt to lay this out in the most general terms I can’t even preface this by saying the standard, “the less you know the better”, simply because the journey to the end is so appropriately dreamlike in its execution I don’t even know what I know. If you know what I mean.
One night everyone has the same dream: They are with someone they trust who leads them to a watery death. Starting with the month of May, the book counts down to the fateful day in November that has now been prophesied as the end of humanity. The reactions are varied from suicide, to denial, to a hopeful reinvigoration of life and attempting to accomplish all those tasks that were put off for another day.
Into this we follow Lyd and Mott, a mother and daughter on the run from a possessive and abusive husband, David. David holds a government job that allows him to spy on citizens in an effort to find traitors in the states. Obsessed with the loss of his wife, he spends his days living in a sprawling house with a growing number of his ‘children’-disaffected and wandering young people living a bacchanalian existence fueled with sex, drugs and an increasing penchant for anarchy and vandalism.
Meanwhile Mott’s mother Lyd has her own issues, the primary being her alcoholism coupled with her crushing dependency on her thirteen year old daughter. She tells her more than once she would die if Mott ever left her.
It’s a cornucopia of awful parenting that had me constantly wondering how far Mott would be put in serious danger. And it was one of the things that made me question so many times why I wasn’t stopping this, and yet for the life of me I was entirely under its twisted spell. This is not going to be a book for everyone and at the same time I want somebody else to read it simply to be able to discuss. And despite the at times meandering story and pace, and a plot I had absolutely no clue where it was headed, the books final pages are hauntingly beautiful, deeply affecting and highly satisfying.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Alcoholism, Death, Drug abuse, Emotional abuse, Mental illness, Rape, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, and Gaslighting
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