Welcome to Litsy!

My reactions to this novel cycled through, 1) "Oh, this is good," 2) "Um, ew?" 3) "Wait...what?" 4) "Why is this guy fighting so much?" Overall, it's a unique look at how family secrets and dysfunctional habits can surface in the face of grief. It presents the reordering of a family as a sort of forced metamorphosis, especially the part where the caterpillar becomes, like, soup before becoming a butterfly. Soft pick. #castthedie #tob25 longlist

#HauntedShelf @PuddleJumper #HexesandCrows @Catsandbooks

Perhaps my expectations were too high. 🫤 I had heard good things about this one, and being a fan of genre-bending, weird novels, I was excited. Unfortunately, though, it just didn't work for me. While I can appreciate the narrative about grief the author was trying to convey, the style of writing kept taking me away from the story instead of letting me become fully immersed.

While I loved the narrators voice - it‘s not written in a format that works for me as an audiobook. The main character is a writer and part of the book is his stories (and going from the narrative thread of moving into his dead mothers house to prepare it for sale to a story about a wealthy man becoming a patron of the arts to masturbate over the artwork was jarring)

Might circle back around if the library gets a print copy, might not.

Grief, life lostness, Gen Z what-the-hell-do-I-do-now? Drinking. Vomiting. Dead skin, self harm. Male Fleabag? Nested stories, sometimes too “look what I found in my writing journal.” Ghost gardener. Quirky, memorable voice. 2024

49 “I put on a T-shirt with an anthropomorphized broccoli on it. The broccoli was wearing sunglasses and doing finger guns and below him it said BRO in big black letters.”

“I had the feeling that I was being watched.”

This book was interesting and held my attention. However, I'm still not sure what I read. I know it was about grief, but it's not clear whether this was all in the narrators mind or reality. I did like how Smith played with form. 3.5 stars.
#ReadAway2024
@Andrew65 @DieAReader @GHABI4ROSES

Finally found a book I can focus on, though I'm still not sure what I'm reading. Seems like a meta fiction ghost story that's a book within a book within a play.