I had some trouble reading much at the beginning of Covid, but when I finally got "my groove" back in terms of reading, I started making up for lost time!
I started moving through some short reads, lighter reads... but then I moved into more from my TBR lists. And this one, with its beautiful cover, caught my eye right away.
The plot follows Gretel as she unravels her - and her mother's - past. Abandoned as a teenager, Gretel has grown up but has never forgotten growing up on the canals of Oxford, especially during the final, fateful winter on the river. But one phone call from her mother brings back all of her old memories, and she pieces the stories and memories together to make sense of the story.
“The places we are born come back to us. They disguise themselves as
words, memory loss, nightmares. They are the way we sometimes wake with
a pressure on our chests that is animal-like or turn on a light and see someone
we'd thought was long gone standing there looking at us.”
I happen to love the plot structure of this particular book (and others structured this way) where the story is told in bits and pieces instead of a linear fashion; perhaps it reminds me of figuring out a puzzle, fitting the pieces together until you see the whole picture. There are three main paths to this story: First is the cottage, which is the "present", where Gretel and her mother live together as her mother struggles with senility. Then, there is the road, which is the recent past, where Gretel searches for her mother and finds out more about the runaway boy who stayed with them that last winter. Finally, there is river, which is the past itself, uncovered in the stories her mother tells of the events of that winter in that boat on that river.
I did figure out what was going to happen fairly early on, but I honestly did not care. The writing in this book is fantastic. It's hard to believe this is Daisy Johnson's first novel; the story is beautiful, the characters rich, the setting captivating.
"I'd always understood that the past did not die just because we
wanted it to. The past signed to us: clicks and cracks in the night,
misspelled words, the jargon of adverts, the bodies that attracted
us or did not, the sounds that reminded us of this or that. The past
was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor. That was why
I looked for you all these years, Sarah. Not for answers,
condolences; not to ply you with guilt or set you up for a fall.
But because – a long time ago – you were my mother and you left."
What stands out most about this book is the writing, so if you're a fan of this style, full of imagery and metaphor, then you will likely enjoy this story. But if you like linear storytelling, you just won't like this.
For me, though, I loved it.
Do you like linear storytelling or other styles?
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