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** spoiler alert ** This book was horrifying � and not in a good way � but I did manage to finish it, so I gave it three stars. But honestly, I couldn't recommend this to anyone without ample warning. I loved the author's nonlinear memoir, "Chronology of Water," so I looked forward to digging into this dystopian novel about a time-traveling young woman who carries objects through time and space to link up disparate stories, challenge those stories and "rewriting" them. I'm all for nonlinear poetics in fiction, especially when trying to bend reality toward speculative futures. But this novel is not very kind to its readers. It was aggressively confusing and disorienting in its absolute refusal to establish shared truths and grounding details. This book was more "look what I can do!" rather than "look what we can do" when it comes to relationship between author and reader. With few grounding throughlines, except perhaps the linked objects that appear throughout time and space, I ended up feeling shattered by the incoherence of this text � the farcical nature of the characters' speech & actions — and the absurdity of clipped-pace changes that didn't align at all with established facts about each of the characters. Historical details were well-researched but when spoken through the various characters, it felt largely unbelievable, exhausting & clichéd. All characters in this novel felt reduced to their essential traumas which made for such a heavy and exhausting read. I wondered if joy, levity, beauty or peace existed at all for any of them, at any time. In the middle of a scene, a character would espouse some lengthy monologue about what they knew about sea creatures or would break into an absurd masturbatory moment that felt violating and totally out of sync with the rest of the story at the moment. At no point did I feel I had any idea about where scenes took place or when, because it leapt around so much. Finally, I will say that I was not prepared for the incestuous relationship between cousins and had to wonder why Yuknavitch relied on their familial relationship to tell the story of "ambitious sculptor Frederic" and his "firebrand American lover Aurora." Like, why did they need to be related. I felt disturbed by the details of their largely epistolary relationship and wondered why Yuknavitch would make that choice. What purpose did it serve that they were related? I appreciate the ways in which Yuknavitch defends nonlinear storytelling to explain time travel and story loops and intersections in the time-space continuum. But it grows repetitive, the number of times she defends herself through her characters in the text, saying over and over again, "Stories take any shape they want. Not all stories happen with a beginning, middle and an end." OK — we got it. That doesn't mean that you have to abandon your reader along the way. Even in nonlinear, nontraditional storytelling, there's profound power in establishing rules and building trust with the reader. In this novel, Yuknavitch made it nearly impossible for readers to follow her incoherent story plots, and then spent lines between the lines defending it. On the sentence level, there were some glorious passages � poetic and astute in their observances of how time works in the body and beyond it. And I cherished those as anchors as I grappled with the text. But ultimately, I felt like the work this book required of me didn't come with any sort of reward. In a recent NYT interview with Yuknavitch, she says that she's looking to break away from the "tyranny of the past." She writes: “Like so many other people, I’m looking for ways to live with a story of self and community and family that is not locked into where I came from, or how it was for me as a child. ... It’s a profound idea in life, that you can make a story that releases you from the tyranny of your past.� But Yuknavitch seems to hold on to her history of sexual abuse and mental illness, infusing those conditions and mental states on her characters without much mercy and asking the readers to bear witness to it. She says it's possible to "change the stories we tell ourselves about who we are" but I only saw in this novel the reproduction of pain and trauma, not a transformation. This book should come with a clear warning that there are incest scenes and I also recommend that the reader asks themselves if they really want to be taken down a rabbit hole of nonsensical, disturbing surrealism guised as prophetic genius. Ultimately, this book felt contrived and I can't recommend it unless you are perhaps interested in catching a glimpse into Yuknavitch's vision of a despairing, incoherent future.