There is an old cliché that goes, "Laughter is the best medicine."

In a literal sense, this is wrong, because the best medicine is a combination of ibuprofen, junk food, and complaining. There is no illness that this all-star lineup cannot solve.

And in a figurative sense, it is also wrong, because while I am a huge laughter stan the actual best medicine is a book getting into your hands right when you are best equipped to appreciate it.

In other words, I am sorry to everyone in the comments who agreed with my original three-star review, because it turns out this book is actually perfect.

I read this book for essentially no reason, in 2019, when the world was okay (not awesome but not on fire) and I was young and innocent and my favorite genre was still, somehow, against all odds, YA contemporary.

Why, I do not know. Seems a recipe for disaster.

Now, three years later, this book has returned to my mind due to the fact that it sounds so up my alley the universe may have prescribed it to me. Character-driven, almost-boring, beautifully written literary fiction about complicated (read: annoying) women is all I want to read.

So I picked this one up.

And holy Moses. (Is that an expression?) This one hit me hard.

Every year I build a favorites shelf of every new-to-me read I five star in that year. I never add rereads, even if they're newly five stars, because it's so specific to that year in my head.

This one got added to favorites-2022 (and thus broke the rules I made up) so fast it broke the sound barrier. Sorry to dogs and fireworks appreciators for startling you and getting your hopes up, respectively.

This was just so exactly what I needed.

I don't know that I've ever annotated more, or savored a book more slowly, or felt so seen and still learned things. This book is riddled with underlines, and I read it in a matter of pages per day, and I never wanted it to end. It made me feel so normal and so seen and so okay.

And it gets better. Because for some reason there's a sequel???

Just when this couldn't be any more perfect for me right now, it turns out the universe decided to give me more. I picked this up for a reread completely arbitrarily only to learn it's getting a sequel 6 years after publication, right after I five starred it.

Everything is perfect.

Or actually everything is pretty bad, but the universe is being really nice to me about it.

Bottom line: I don't know what to say about this, really. It's beautifully written, it's incredibly real, it is the ibuprofen/junk food/complaining of books, for my broken brain.

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original three-star review

Sometimes, I finish a book and I don’t know how I feel about it.

This happens a lot of times, in fact. And I have two main strategies for dealing with it. In one, I rate it approximately, confidently say review to come, wait four months (I’m in the midst of a major backlog, okay, I’m not any more a fan of it than you are. In fact I’m probably way less of a fan, because it spares you from having to experience my reviews - a definitively good thing - while it only makes me aware of the fact that I have, like, 100 pages of review-writing ahead of me. And it’s the kind where I can’t remember the book. A true nightmare), then maybe change the rating and post the review.

That’s the good method. (Hard as it may be to believe. The standards are low.)

The bad method, and the one I employed here, is not even rating it. Not even giving it a temporary rating. Just...leaving it in weird review purgatory.

Out of pure laziness and an inability to employ my critical thinking skills.

This was a strange book to read, and, true to form, it’s a strange book to review.

This is one of those slightly radical literary fiction reads with a unique way of looking at the world and a unique style to match that always end up changing my internal monologue for 7-10 business days.

The main reason I don’t read literary fiction (beyond the fact that I spend most of my time reading and trashing YA contemporary) is that, whether I like it or not, I basically live inside it while I’m reading it and for days after.

That’s debilitating.

For this book, which is sad and intense and basically unsatisfying as a rule, that was nothing short of consistently mildly to severely unpleasant.

But I don’t think it’s a bad book, necessarily. I think the writer is very good, and I was fairly consumed by this start to finish. (Obviously.)

It’s just...at the end, I was left feeling a bit, well, awful. And I couldn’t figure out what the point of it was - me feeling that way, or the book, or any of it.

Not a promising way to feel about a book.

Bottom line: I still don’t know any of the answers to any of these questions, so...three stars.

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well now i'm all melancholy.

review to come / rating also to come

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it is with great sadness and regret that i must inform you...

this book stole the working title of my autobiography