Buntin’s premise may be familiar, but the novel pays masterful attention to complexity, presenting events and relationships in all their strangeness and contradictions. Her language is superb; for all Will’s self-assuredness, the precarity of her situation, tied so inextricably to Nathaniel, is rendered in such exacting and heartrending detail as to make the reader’s teeth ache. The structure of the novel allows for heightened poignancy as Will reflects on the consequences of the choices she made over the years, as well as the ones she didn’t. A searing, brilliant novel about power, and stories, and who gets to tell them.
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