I am VERY behind on these – this set is from the end of August through early October.
Whalefall, by Daniel Kraus: So much of this was ridiculous, and the prose veered very purple, but damn I have to hand it to the author for coming up with this conceit – a modern-day Jonah, basically – and sticking with it in the most comparatively realistic way possible.
The Garden, by Clare Beams: I loved The Illness Lesson and read this with interest but was ultimately not blown away by the plot or ideas. I liked that the main character was prickly, but for a premise with so much potential the story didn’t really pan out.
The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore: Heard many things about this before reading it; I kept trying to figure out if the dual timelines were really necessary, but they also didn’t bother or confuse me, so why question it? The Judyta sections were the most compelling and I thought Moore generally stuck the landing (more so, in my opinion, in the 1970s storyline than the earlier one). I did question a few characters’ motives in framing people…
The Cemetery of Untold Stories, by Julia Alvarez: I expected this to literally be a set of unfinished stories, perhaps held together by some minimal framework (and I was already jealous of this concept), but it was much more developed than that, with the actual cemetery a part of a larger story. None of the “untold stories” felt incomplete or forced together.
I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman: This one gave me some existential dread. Very compact and also claustrophobic. I wished more had been explained, even though I know that wasn’t the point.
