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“Life, she understands, is a collapsing down, a succession of memories held not in sequence but together, occurring and recurring all at once.��

After falling head over heels for Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea a little while back, I was totally stoked for the release of this novel. I’m sorry to say, I feel a bit disappointed this time around. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I couldn’t quite muster up the same level of enthusiasm for it! As far as the prose, on a sentence level this was equally masterful. The story itself is what left me feeling kind of enervated. A bit limp. Maybe it was all that rain and dreariness that did it. After all, the book is set during a dystopian world where rain dominates everything.

“It rains constantly and the fact of the rain, of the rain’s whole great impending somethingness, runs parallel to the day-to-day of work and sleep and lottery tickets, of yoga challenges, of buying fruit and paying taxes, of mopping floors and taking drugs on weekends and reading books and wondering what to do on dates. It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up one’s attention �� exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.��

See what I mean about the writing �� yes! It's the stuff about memory (like that first quote above) and family and sisterhood that jazzed me up the most. The gist of this story is that three sisters are left to deal with the death of their father. And the three sisters aren’t all too warm and fuzzy �� with one another or with the reader. And good ole pop wasn’t exactly the poster boy for fatherhood either. That’s okay though. I didn’t mind that part. Family dynamics always intrigue me. Armfield alternates points of view between Irene, Isla and Agnes. Oh, even the City has a little voice interspersed here and there. I liked that quite a lot. There’s an underlying current of something eerie, and the rain adds to that feeling. I did like the interplay between distorted memory and distorted view due to that excess of water. Even the people seem to have transformed due to the constant deluge.

“Irene often feels she can detect a certain amphibious quality in the people with whom she shares transportation, shares offices, shares the ingrown cramp of city space.��

Throughout the entirety of the novel, I was expecting this to go somewhere and knock me for a loop. Instead, my kneejerk reaction at the end was “Oh, come on. Really?!�� Well, I can’t tell you why. It might be just your thing, but it wasn’t mine. I was a bit relieved when it was all over. Enough of that rain! I happily basked in a small patch of sunlight that managed to creep through the picture window in the living room. It’s warming my back on this frigid, snowy day as I type this review, too. Read Our Wives Under the Sea if you want the perfect introduction to Julia Armfield!

Here are a few of my favorite quotes, because like I said, many of her sentences captivated me!

“How, she wondered, was one supposed to grieve an absence when that absence was familiar? What, she wondered, was grief without a clear departure to regret?��

“The first time you lose a parent, a part of you gets trapped there, trapped less in the moment of grief than in the knowledge of the end of childhood, the inevitable dwindling of the days.��

“Sisterhood, she thinks, is a trap. You all get stuck in certain roles forever.��

“The problem with love, of course, is that it frequently asks too much of unlovable people. It can be hard,on even the best of days, to compel oneself to be selfless and patient and undemanding or even halfway reasonable when one is not given to any of those behaviors. But these are nonetheless the qualities that love demands.��

“Love, it seems, is bizarre in its moment of realization, too blatant to speak aloud.��

“At what point, she wanted to say, do we stop being the direct product of our parents? At what point does it start being our fault?��