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What a beautiful, unusual, interesting, worthwhile read! I am so glad the owner of one of the local independent bookstores recommended this to me so highly (& then I was lucky enough to see the author at a book reading soon thereafter). I now would DEFINITELY recommend it as well. But what to say; how to describe this very unique plot and especially style of writing?

There is no spoiler (if you've read the publisher's blurb or anything about this at all) to state that it's the story of a young girl (Margaret) who feels she has (unwittingly) been responsible for killing her good friend Agnes when the 2 four year old girls are playing at hiding in an old empty cooler & Margaret can't unlatch it after Agnes hides in there. Margaret freaks out that she can't unlatch it and runs away, leaving Agnes to suffocate in there.

As awful as this sounds (and it is), it's the arresting interplay Oshetsky creates between the experiences Margaret has of this, of other parts of her life, of her fantastical ethereal life, of the small joys she finds in her life, the increasingly abusive treatment by her mother, and of in particular Poor Deer, her guilty conscience which haunts her in the form of an inner figure which becomes quite real to her; which all make for the immersive read.

The themes here are rich and full of very thought-inspiring aspects (more in a moment on that). It's the writing which I wish to highlight first, because Oshetsky is one to watch (I didn't know of their first book)--extraordinary and distinctive, lyrical and amazingly resonant with the life of a young girl and her inner thoughts. It was hard for me to discern if Margaret was actually as slow and "differently-abled" as her mother (& some others) described her, or if she was more of an ethereal person, living often in her own innerly creative and created world. At any rate, after the incident, the inner world became even more of her reality to hide in, owing to her fear, guilt, and confusion. But always, the authors' skillful use of words to let Margaret describe her experience--interchanged with third person descriptions--felt amazingly true to the ages she was at each point. There is some distinctive, beautiful writing here which I am at a loss to describe aptly. A thread of light humor alights on much of the narrative, even as grueling themes are often present.

Insofar as themes: guilt, shame, conscience, religion/Catholicism, faith, societal aspersions, self-harm, forgiveness (particularly of self), love, truth and lies, fantasy, inner life, family, and more...all woven with such skill as to make a riveting read.

It's ultimately the manner in which the guilt and shame is worked with that makes this a very human, relatable, and hard-to-put down read, because we wonder all along how this very difficult incident and its reverberations will affect Margaret's life daily, how her sense of self is created and might change over time from this pivotal formative incident, and how things will play out. The author has a wonderful ability to convey the process from inside of Margaret, outward.

All of this is why this book earns my somewhat rare, and well deserved, 5-star rating. I'm also a bit tickled and proud to have learned Oshetsky is a local author here in the very creative pool of Santa Cruz county writers. An outstanding literary contribution from this new-to-me author.