Rebecca Dinerstein

I keep clicking on four stars, and then five stars, and then four stars...which maybe means that a 4.5 is in order.

I did not realize that this book was funny until about one hour in, and then my experience of it did a 180. It's hilarious, like, almost-did-a-spit-take, chortled-to-myself-on-my-morning-walk hilarious, and the audio is narrated by Jenny Slate, which doesn't hurt at all. (side bar: I found out while poking around that Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is also the author of The Sunlit Night, which was made into a movie. I cried while watching the trailer at least twice; Jenny Slate also stars in that movie.) But, crucially, it's funny in an unexpected way. Usually when books are funny they announce it with their cadence, but here, I wasn't sure if a sentence was going to end with a pang or with a laugh.

I did find there to be a lot of sentences that did so much inverting of words and subverting of expectations that I could see how a reader could get tired of that; I thought the book was just short enough that it didn't matter, and I was always waiting for the next joke so I didn't care. The central relationship is so bizarre that maybe folks didn't find it believable. But I think the book is ultimately about...desire? The fact that I know that it's definitely about something but am not sure what makes it a high-star book in my mind, because I know that I'll be able to keep going back to it and keep thinking about it for a while.… (mer)