5 stars, maybe 10 stars? A lot of stars. - I won a kindle edition of this book from a goodreads giveaway, so thank you to goodreads. I opened it last week, just to see what the vibe was, if it was something I really wanted to read.

Yes. Yes, it was.

I wish I was well versed in classical music and could tell which Beethoven piece this novel is structured like, if it’s one of the ones mentioned by the narrator, or if it’s another one we’re supposed to know by cultural osmosis and probably do, if we heard it. But reading this book . . . it starts off with a quickly building crescendo, or at least that’s how I remember it. The first 30% just had me clutching at my hair with these observation and descriptions, eventually, I put it down to catch my breath and reflect. 

The middle section I read in fits and starts over a few days, and then I read the last 30% in basically one go again. Maybe the book is not based on any specific piece, rather it just has that thematic feeling that a symphony does, where the 88 keys of the piano and all the strings of the orchestra seem somehow infinite, yet keep playing over the same patterns, building on phrases and ideas that came before.

I wondered as I finished the book, if all the characters we meet and/or speak to are meant to be alternate versions of the main character, proof that in different worlds, he could have taken any of their paths. We see the echoes of something of Sol in everyone he meets.

His assistant, who seems to be a hardened gender essentialist lesbian who admits that they have so much in common and yet hates Sol for the choices he’s made. The gender dysphoric love interest who uses her/their/his fascination with Sol to work out personal issues, but does genuinely care for him. The Jewish trans man at the blood bank who is content with his life as a caretaker, and tries to take special care of fellow trans people. The older vampire archivist who helps him figure out why his presence at the job that has been his entire life since being infected is suddenly causing decay and destruction. Even the dead wife of his new lover, the enigmatic creator of his favorite show, seems to be chafing against the constraints of the gender binary in the glimpses and descriptions we get of her.

We first meet Sol years after he has been purposely infected with vampirism to stop him dying from tetanus. But this all came shortly after he transitioned, and so he is frozen in many ways. His transition can’t progress beyond where he was when he became a vampire, and he can’t live a typical life in any other way, having to avoid the sun and therefore the vast majority of human activity. (And yes, he gets the irony of his chosen name.)

We don’t see how Sol deals with all of that in real time; we are with him five years later when he recalls the events that led to his situation, and starts to realize he’s going to have to believe that this is actually his life and won’t get better. He will have to deal with who he is now and HOW he is now.

But it’s being told from the very beginning by a Sol of the future, who knows what happened and gives us a few subtle assurances along the way that all will be well, or as well as it can be, when we leave the characters. But apart from those tiny narrative touches, I didn’t really know where we were going, just let myself be swept along the peaks and valleys of this crisis in Sol’s undead life.

This is one of the better uses of mixed media I’ve ever read, which of course fits the story of an archivist, looking back through someone else’s life in the fragments they left behind, but it’s the unexpectedly discovered correspondence he has with his love interest, who is going through their own gender issues in the present that forms the beginning of a powerful middle chapter. The debate that the characters have over slash fic is one of I’ve heard many times before, but never quite so eloquently and emotionally before. What is the value of solace and how much should we desire it?

And while the books starts out with a bang, has a crescendo in the middle, and spends the last part diligently working towards it’s conclusion, the very end echoed in my mind, like the last plaintive strains of a symphony, the notes hanging in the air, reverberating and resonating, even after the music has stopped.

This is one of the best books I’ve read in recent memory, and I hope it finds the readers who might most need it and appreciate it.