yeesh. This was a sad, grim, horrible book. I'd call it misanthropic, except it's not that other people are bad or hateful. It's that everyone is miserable and sad, and there's no joy to be had in one's life, only attempts to pretend at it on the surface. People who think they're happy are naive and foolish, and every attempt at which human a connection might be made, an honest truth exchanged, is either missed, or ends up being unsatisfying. It's a book about a fundamentally suicidal woman who doesn't realize that suicide is an option. It's a book in which clinical depression seems the obvious diagnosis, except that the problem is the entire world is depressed, not just the primary viewpoint character. It was an miserable book, written by a miserable author, and it made me miserable to have read it.