ŷ������

I’m on my pogo stick again, yahoo!

This, this here is why I love books. This story is just magical! It took me out of my life and into the head of a girl named Margaret, who as a very young kid was part of something bad that happened. For the rest of her life, guilt engulfed her. An ugly creature, named Poor Deer, is Margaret’s conscience, and he sits in corners and tortures her with words, insisting she fess up. He has hooves and yellow nubs for teeth. I can still see him, he is so vivid with his hideous presence.

Now, I was tempted to hit Poor Deer over the head with my pogo stick, because I grew very attached to Margaret and wanted him to knock it off, leave her alone. But I knew Margaret’s heart and soul needed him there. He was both infuriating and fascinating.

It’s ingenious the way the author made this all work. She has this amazing imagination, and something about how she develops her characters (and my attachment to them) made this hard-to-please realist enamored. Magical realism is a hard sell for me, but sometimes it hits me just so, like it did here, and I’m all in. Also, this book has a fairy tale quality to it, which is almost always a no sale for me. But surprising myself, I loved the fairy-tale-ness of it all. It’s hard to describe this book. Oshetsky creates a world that is off-kilter, dark, intense, and riveting. And she does so with beauteous, powerful language.

Margaret is an odd and quiet kid who lives with her not-so-loving mother and her kinder aunt. She has made up her own written language. And she makes up stories with their own happy endings; sometimes you can’t be sure that what appears to be happening in the here and now isn’t just a made-up tale that’s inside Margaret’s head. It played with my own head in the best possible way. And I could see the writer going back and forth with the storyline, which felt authentic and artful and somehow quite cozy. Luckily, the game of reality vs. make-believe didn’t interfere with the plot or the cool tone of this dark and unusual story. It’s funny—all the playfulness about what was actually real created ambiguity, which is another of my most unfavorite things. But here, I was totally sold. I guess I unconsciously chose the story that I thought was real. Kudos to the writer for guiding me without my knowing it, lol. And without being pushy or in my face.

Here are some samples of how make-believe is mixed up with reality, how the line between the two is blurred:

“I’ve been telling made-up stories for so long that the unadorned truth feels ugly and ungrammatical and the facts feel like borrowed broken things picked out at random from a jumble of hearsay and old gossip.��

“And whether I’m about to be the hero of my own story, or the villain, or the sacrificial lamb, or a person of no importance who is forgotten in the end, I won’t know until I’ve come to the final page.��

Even though I’ve gotten carried away talking about reality versus make-believe, I don’t want to leave the impression that this book is all ephemeral or confusing. It’s not. There’s a strange plot that keeps moving right along, and there are dreadful mishaps that occur along the way. There are two timelines: one is the past, and one is this weird present, where Margaret is in a motel near Niagara Falls with two random people, and with Poor Deer in the corner. In fact, the motel room is the opening scene. I was grabbed immediately, as I tried to make sense of how and why she was at a motel in the middle of nowhere. The author cleverly and slowly doles out hints.

In tone, this book reminds me somewhat of The Enchanted, an enchanted book that I still have running through my veins eight years after I’ve read it. It was fun to relive that feeling with this book.

And for those of you who are fans of Oshetsky’s earlier work, Chouette, you will not be disappointed. Although the two novels are very different, this book is equally as weird and wonderful. With Chouette, I felt like I had never read anything like it. Well, I felt the same about this book.

Magical realism; a fairy-tale feel; a strange, dark plot; an intriguing and endearing main character; an off-kilter vibe: Mix those ingredients all up in a pot, and a rich and delicious broth, with real depth of flavor, emerges. That’s what we have here, in spades. I can’t wait for you all to get to read it!

Thanks to NetGalley and Edelweiss for the advance copy.

Publication date: January 9, 2024