Welcome to Litsy!

It‘s not for everyone. The choice of storytelling. The character voice or the non-linear as linear. It‘s the issues faced by teens, but the distractions in this book as asides made it hard for me to understand…anything. Some may like it. I just didn‘t vibe with it. Gave up 3/4 way through.

I did not expect to love this book as much as I did. It was equal parts creepy and beautiful. I love that it was written in the perspective of the three teenagers, all so unique and able to sympathize with.
I'll probably be thinking about this book for a long time

5 stars
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This book has left such an impact on my being. So so deep, I can‘t even muster the energy to put it into words. I simultaneously feel wholly changed yet closer to the person I was before picking up this novel. A piece of art that tackles who we are, where we go, and what we do along the way. Everything and yet nothing matters all at once. Cannot recommend this expertly-crafted masterpiece enough. Just.. read at your own risk. It‘ll make sense soon

"He begins to cry. A sound like colony collapse."

"Mom called Dad‘s work. They told her he never came in. As far as they were concerned, he was fired. “Why didn‘t you call me?” She yelled into the phone. “I‘m his goddamn emergency contact.” “Why would we do that?” they said and hung up."

Once again, gawd, you could not pay me enough to be a teenager again.

"The Burnet Library was small but monstrous. Named after a man who‘d hanged dozens of Quakers, long ago when the town was young."

"He was naked, and the dusk or dawn light cast his alabaster body blue and pink. Like the world snapping in half and spilling raw milk into space."

"The house was like a twisted-up napkin, or a filthy KKK hood. A round house, with walls corkscrewing into a pointed steeple. The woods were darker in its space. Like a place that wanted to kill you."

"Minute after minute rotted by."

"As long as I can remember there was that low hum of suicide ringing through my body. I‘d close my eyes and have flashes of strange industrial machines punching holes in my skin. My form cracking on rocks beneath a jagged cliff. A thousand blades reducing me to ribbons. Rearranging my body in ways not available to me in life. Pushing me across a threshold to be reborn as something novel."

"All the world blurred, a vibrating hemorrhage, and it was fine because I could finally feel how little impact I‘d ever have on the world. Losing that dread that one day you‘ll somehow ruin everything, for yourself and everyone else. The realization that I could simply leave and the world wouldn‘t miss me."

"Below, the lights looked like jellyfish and fireflies, and just then I decided I wanted to be buried at sea."

"My shoulders and chest bumping off other shoulders and chests, distant voices echoing *back off* and *what the fuck* eternally, past awful Tricia and the knife-rip chads, all leaned up against the dishwasher and butcher‘s block, shrieking like buzzards, and I slipped out through the screen door like a c-section."

"The sun edged over the horizon, dying the whole sky blood and milk, and I almost felt safe."