This book, wow. I don’t even know where to begin. I’m going to say right now that this is one of the most difficult books for me to review, I think ever. I finished it over a week ago but it’s taken me that long to figure out what I want to say. I’ll explain why a little later, for now here is the synopsis from its Goodreads page:
In the hip haven of Portland, Oregon, a pack of unsteady but loyal friends asks what it means to bring babies into an already crowded world.
Sarah studies animal behavior at the zoo. She’s well versed in the mating habits of captive animals, and at the same time she’s desperate to mate, to create sweet little offspring of her own. Georgie is busy with a newborn, while her husband, Humble, finds solace in bourbon and televised violence. Dulcet makes a living stripping down in high school gyms to sell the beauty of sex-ed. Nyla is out to save the world while having trouble saving her own teen daughter, who has discovered the world of drugs and the occult. As these friends and others navigate a space between freedom and intimacy, they realize the families they forge through shared experience are as important as those inherited through birth.
First of all, even though my introduction was a little scary, I really enjoyed this book. It was creative in an genuine way: it didn’t try to be anything it wasn’t for the sake of being unpredictable or to convince the reader of a certain message. This is a character-driven story that I can tell Ms. Drake told out of her own pure talent.
Why is this book hard to review? Because it was so brazen, honest, sarcastic, satirical, and any other synonym Webster has to offer about something that I hold very near and dear: motherhood. Each character is in a different place in respect to motherhood; Sarah desperately wants to be a mother despite her numerous miscarriages, Dulcet couldn’t want anything less, and Nyla is busy raising her quickly growing-into-adulthood daughter, Arena, who herself is exploring her possibilities with the opposite sex for the first time.
The genius part of this book is that I know I fell right into the trap Drake set for me. She knew that this book would press buttons, and it DID! That’s why this is so hard to review, because at so many times in this book I grimaced and cringed and these characters and their choices, that grimace being especially strong because I’m a mom myself. But I can’t deny the sagacity in that, she knew what she was doing.
She does a wonderful job of setting the story and its characters, I’ve never been to Portland but truly felt like not only was I there but that I was a long-time resident annoyed by the sudden influx of hipsters in the past few years. I’ve never been a biology or science buff but Sarah’s monologues about the primal instincts of the animals she monitors at the zoo had me captivated.
This book gave me one of my new favorite quotes ever, it’s a long one. Here’s the picture I posted on our Instagram:
“Reading about sex was intimate. Reading about anything was like this really cool secret code from one brain to another, like ESP. Arena looked at the letters. How was it that letters turned into sounds? And sounds formed words and words could mean absolutely anything and everything, even bodily fluids – and what exactly let her brain know how to decipher meaning from marks on a page?
Weird.
Writing was the most abstract art ever. She wrote in the back of her book, rough lines, making the letters as awkward and cryptic as possible. She wrote, “gOd.” Then she turned the page to Alpha Nerd.
“What do you see?”
He said, “God?”
She nodded. There it was, the collective delusion. She’d made him see God in a few lines.”
Seriously, how good is that?!
The reason I picked up this book was because I saw that Chuck Palahniuk gave it a great review and I can definitely see the similarities. If there is a number 10 of discomfort, they take it to number 11. When you think she couldn’t possibly go there, she does. It’s a great book, just one that wasn’t necessarily easy to swallow.
You can find it on Amazon here, on Barnes & Noble here, and find the author on Twitter here.
Tweet
