this cover is exactly what reading a book you're obsessed with feels like.

and this book is like if the unbelievably secondhand stressful parts of young adult books in which the newly magical / haunted / superhuman teenagers refuse to do their homework were interspersed with passages of brilliant analytical clarity.

it also is very debut-y, which is a nice way of saying it contains lines like the protagonist reading plath's ariel for the first time in her "oven-hot bedroom" that just make you want to curl up and die.

it's about a first-generation asian immigrant from australia, who receives a fellowship to work on her "postcolonial" novel and/or "postcolonial sylvia plath" phd in england. she doesn't really do either, is the plot.

i don't love sylvia plath and this book (perhaps intentionally?) affirmed all of my reasons for that unpopular opinion, which was both fun and annoying.

but it did have lots to say about misogyny, and some about race and privilege, and some about academia, and i found almost all of it interesting.

bottom line: i liked the good more than i disliked the bad!