A meandering observation of where life ends and death begins—how we pretend to keep the dead alive, how the living sometimes want to be dead and the dead want to be alive. An interesting premise, but I didn’t find much beyond that. 

There were  stretches of enjoyable writing, but the overarching story lacked cohesion. I was never able to gain traction with a main plot/objective. Characters came and went without unique purpose. 

From a writing standpoint, Williams over-deploys vocab words to the point that it took me out of the text. I found it especially frustrating how unbelievable the children’s dialogue could be. The whole stilted dialogue thing is a trope that’s worked for other 1990s/2000s era writers, but I thought it was a swing and a miss in this case.