A review by foggy_rosamund
The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan

4.0

Keirnan takes the idea of an unreliable narrator and turns it around. Imp is trying to be a reliable narrator; she wants to tell the truth of what happened to her. But she can't trust her own memories and her own experiences. She's schizophrenic, and she's experiencing events that may or may not be supernatural. This is an impressive novel: like Kiernan's earlier The Red Tree it's written in the form of a manuscript, complete with mistakes and crossings-out, and is written by a frightened woman desperately trying to get the details down. But Imp is more measured that the narrator of The Red Tree, and the book feels more complete to me: the story more satisfying, the writing more polished. Kiernan successfully deals with juggling two conflicting narratives, and with inserting stories, descriptions of paintings, and extracts from newspapers into the narrative. It can be hard to pull off so much intertextuality, but she succeeds. It's a lush book, full of beautiful prose, and full of the sense of another world. It deals with its characters carefully and fairly, and I found it immersive and compelling. Recommended.