Book Review: The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

This post is a review of The Book of Goose by author Yiyun Li.

I adored this novel. I saw it on a list of 'best fiction books of 2022' and the cover, title, and the praise it received piqued my interest enough to pick it up at my local library. The blurb didn't really sell it to me, and I thought I might be in for a pleasant but generally okay reading experience. Boy was I wrong. This book blew my mind, it was so lovely.

Acclaim and Accolades for The Book of Goose

Winner of the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Long-listed for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

A Slate Top Ten Book of the Year

A TIME Best Fiction Book of 2022

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Financial Times, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Buzzfeed, and more.

What is The Book of Goose about?

This novel reads as a memoir of sorts. It tells the story of a friendship between two young girls, Agnes and Fabienne, living in a rural postwar French town. At its opening, Agnes is now grown and living in America, having long lost touch with her girlhood best friend, Fabienne.

The story opens with the news of Fabienne's death, propelling Agnes back to that time they shared and the profound impact it had on her life both then and now. She takes us along for the ride as she relives that one particularly eventful year in their lives that would lead to Agnes' greatest adventure and her most profound loss.

For me, this is a story about the blurred lines of true intimacy. When two wills are so intertwined it's difficult to see when one ends and the other begins. It's as exciting as it is frightening, and it's all-encompassing.

It's this obsessed form of love that I find to be at the center of this novel and it's so interesting to see it uncovered. There is the deep anticipation of knowing that a love such as this can only end in tragedy, but that does little to prepare you for the eventuality of its demise.

This is a beautiful story of love and friendship. It's also a story about self-abandonment and the threads of how all these many parts weave themselves into our lives. I enjoyed the look back from an adult Agnes to give this full perspective- in the girl she was then, we can see the seeds for the woman she is now.

Storyline (Blurb) of The Book of Goose

Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised—the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now Agnès is free to tell her story.

As children in a war-ravaged backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves—until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.

A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.

What I Liked About This Book

The Writing

Particularly the simplicity of the writing. This story is told so simply it makes you believe you could have written it. But I at least know that I couldn't have.

It's also written beautifully. The sentences flow and the whole thing feels lyrical but not glaringly so. It's so subtle. Everything is so subtle and that's where its true brilliance is.

The Characters

The story, told from Agnes' point of view, centers around Agnes and Fabienne's friendship. So they are the two most important characters and they are both so complete. They have depth and enough layers to make them as real as you and I. I'm most impressed that Fabienne could feel just as real, existing to us only as told by Agnes through her memory.

The additional characters are equally fleshed out, even if the fullness of their stories doesn't make it onto the page. I feel like I know enough about the boarding school caretaker and the headmistress, for example, to fully animate them.

The Pace

The tempo of how everything happens in this story is so natural, it's almost unremarkable. Yet again, this is the brilliance. Nothing is too slow or too fast, it's all just uncovered as it's meant to, taking us along effortlessly.

The Landscapes

This book is set in the rural French countryside, then very briefly in London and Paris, and then in a private home turned boarding school in Pennsylvania. While this story doesn't rely heavily on these landscapes, they are still painted beautifully and create a full backdrop without taking anything away from the story.

Everything, All At Once

When something is really good, it's difficult to say why. I find that to be the case here. I know I loved the story, I know the characters were wonderful and whole, I know the pace was great, and the various scenes were painted with an expert brush.

But are these things the reason the book is great? Yes and no. All these things are necessary and they work together to create a great story, but what is truly magnificent about this book is the experience that all those parts came together to create.

That experience is my highest praise and it's this: I picked it up and didn't want to put it down until it was over, and then I felt a sense of loss.

What I Disliked About This Book

Precious Little

It would be fair to say I loved this book. So, it's quite difficult for me to find things that I didn't like about it. It's also quite frustrating because I pride myself on giving fair critiques, and part of that feels like pointing out at least some things that were handled poorly because most books have them.

But, I also pride myself on being honest and I can't make up faults where I see none. So, I'm basically going to leave this section blank because I can't think of a single thing to put here.

Oh, I just thought of one: what I disliked most about this book is that it ended.

Verdict: 4.5 Stars

This is a brilliant book written by a seasoned author whose experience shines in all the subtleties of this story. She doesn't beat us over the head with anything grand and yet the end result is just that. It reads like a masterpiece and simultaneously like a simple story told unassumingly by a halfhearted narrator at some park bench. If that is not brilliance, I don't know what is.

If you have eyes to read, you should pick up this book. I don't think it has a target audience. It's just good and it's good for everyone. I highly recommend it. I will be investing time into her previous works because this is an author whose voice I love and if this book is anything to go by, I'll enjoy her other offerings as well.

Let me know if you pick it up and what you think of it.

Other Books by Yuyin Li:

• Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace with Yuyin Li

• Must I Go

• Where Reasons End

• Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

• The Story of Gilgamesh

• Kinder Than Solitude

• Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

• The Vagrants

• A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Happy reading and talk soon,

Nonjabulo

Book Review: All This Could be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

This post is a review of All This Could Be Different by debut author Sarah Thankam Mathews.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. I saw it on a list of 'best fiction books of 2022' and the cover, title, and blurb piqued my interest enough to pick it up at my local library.

What is All This Could All Be Different book about?

For me, this is a novel about growing up. Specifically, it's a novel about navigating that newly adult space that takes shape after college but before real responsibility. When the world suddenly expects you to be an adult but you still feel a bit like a kid.

So, in a sense, it's a coming-of-age story but more mature than the teenage angst and typical age group that that genre encompasses. The issues that the main character, Sneha, and her friends face are fully grown, and navigating them requires depth- but this is a depth of maturity that this group of characters doesn't always have.

This book feels like watching them practice adulthood and rooting for them to figure it out.

Storyline of This Could All Be Different

This story follows our main character, Sneha, an Indian immigrant in America as she moves for a straight-out-of-college job in Milwaukee during the jobless recession of the early Obama administration.

We learn about the precarious situation of her job offer, which had first been a saving grace but soon becomes a shady deal as unsteady as the one that sent her father to prison and then deported him back to India, her mother going with him, leaving Sena alone in an often hostile world where she tries to survive by blending in, to the point of disappearing altogether.

In this book, we follow her journey of her self-discovery and how she comes to choose to fight for the space, relationships, and life she has not always felt she deserves.

What I Liked About This Book

A Fight Against Herself

In a lot of ways, I found this book to hinge on internal conflicts- most of them belonging to the main character.

We see her navigate her sexuality and how it clashes with her family values. Her depression vs her inability to express it because of the great luck of her position compared to everyone back home. The deep love she has for her family vs the ways her family has hurt her while creating an unsafe space to express that hurt.

Her desire to be seen and understood as her true self vs her need to survive and not be seen as problematic in any way.

Power Dynamics

Another key theme of this book was power and who has it and who does not. Sneha doesn't have power because she's an immigrant. Her friend, Tig, doesn't have power because she doesn't have money and this constantly threatens her livelihood. Both of them have power deficits on account of their brown bodies and queer identities.

Past this, even the people we think have done power don't. Thom: white, male, and American is also powerless against the same recession and system that forces him into a manual labor job that is relentlessly cruel to his body and health. Sneha's boss is a cog in a machine that soon spits him out just the same.

Hope

This is a book that brims with hope, against all odds. Sneha learns to make peace with her past and her present, making possible the chance for a truly beautiful future. Beautiful in the sense of allowing her to exist fully as herself and allow in all that she hopes for. Thom joins Tig in her vision for a communal home where they'll always belong.

Although amused and annoyed at how pretentious the charade of it seems to be, at her old friend's wedding, the group all comes together to celebrate love. And they discover that love is there to be celebrated.

Even with all the trials they each face, they all walk away with hope for the future. Not a flimsy how based on wishful thinking but a solid hope that's based on taking action in the direction of what they want and whose expectations are based in reality. This is perhaps the biggest indicator of their maturity.

This is a book I would recommend to every young person who feels lost in that 'not-quite-an-adult-yet' space.

Sex Exploration

The exploration and discussion of sex, particularly domination-kink-lesbian-sex as seen through the lens of the main character, was a revelation. It was interesting and uncomfortable and exciting. It felt honest and raw, outside of the excitement that reading any sex scene generates, this raw honesty is a merit in itself and is one of my favorite things in any medium.

It doesn't matter what you tell me, just make it honest. I commend her for this because shedding that protection of propriety is scary, but past that threshold is where all great writing resides.

What I Disliked About This Book

Novice

This book reads like a first novel. A very well-written and thought-out first novel, but a first novel nonetheless. There is a patina of novice that I can't help pick up. I don't know how useful this is as a criticism considering that this is Thankam Mathew's first novel, but it's worth noting. I think all of my other criticisms stem from this one central idea, so understanding it helps to qualify and anchor them.

Tighty-Contained/ Low Stakes

This book felt safe. I had a general feeling that everything would work out in the end. Now, a happy or hopeful ending in and of itself is a great thing. I like that as much as the next person, and I don't believe a story has to be gruesome or spirit-breaking to be good. However, I do think that there has to be enough space between the author and her characters to save them from the protection that lack of space creates.

I don't think these characters had that. I sensed from the beginning that they were so close to her that she could never truly hurt them or let them fall even if she wanted to. There are hints of danger, and traces of pain- but all this happens within the safely contained world of her loving hands. She won't let them fall. This killed the stakes and created a reading experience for which my investment had limitations.

Characters

I enjoyed these characters yet they felt a little thin in a way that made them unreal for me. That's not to say that they weren't well thought-out or that they lacked complexity because they didn't, but for the density that complexity and well-thought-out layers create, they lacked a lightness to animate them and fully bring them to life. I enjoyed these characters but they felt like characters. They were not as real as you and me as I would have liked.

Verdict: 3.5 Stars

I think the book All This Could All Be Different is a great literary contribution by Sarah Thankam Mathews, particularly as a first novel. The literary world agrees. Her book was shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Award, Discover Prize, and Aspen Literary Prize. I enjoyed her voice and I'm happy that it seems to be one we'll be hearing from again and again.

My Take:

I enjoyed the story she told and how she told it. At its most brilliant, it offered refreshing honesty and I felt like I was in on her secrets. The story is complex enough to be interesting and the various subject matters are handled with responsibility and care.

However, I think they might be handled with too much care which I found to diminish the stakes. In general, I also think that the story and the characters could have been more real. For as well as it was written, it never quite stopped feeling like a story. For these reasons, I give the book a 3.5-star rating.

Let me know if you pick it up and what you think of it.

Happy reading and talk soon,

Nonjabulo

Book Review: This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley

This post is a book review and brief discussion of 'This Here Flesh' by New York Times best-selling author, Cole Arthur Riley.

What Is 'This Here Flesh'?

I would classify this work as part memoir, part social commentary, part poetry, and all heart. Cole takes us through the threads that weave the story of her family and thus, her. We are as flies on the wall as she shares the joys, traumas, and triumphs that shaped the people that shaped her; particularly her grandmother and her father, but I feel too the delicacy and strength of the loving bond with her sister. Each relationship, a transformative love.

For me, this work is about family and about memories- the importance of shared history and the imperativeness of its remembrance.

Paradoxically, it's also about the transient nature of all things. We need to remember because soon we will forget and be forgotten. Cole shares her personal struggles with the unknown disease that is robbing her of her faculties; her movement, her sight. I see poetry in her desire to look past herself, through time, to the moments that would come to form her flesh.

What I Loved About 'This Here Flesh'

This book gave me life. It delivered to me a piece of myself and I'm still not sure which piece but I'm not convinced that's the important part. The important part, I think, is that I felt richer and more tangible the more I read. It was more than feeling seen, it was being held. I felt held. Contained. Arthur's words felt like a constant presence and comfort, even when it was uncomfortable and even painful.

I appreciated the peek into the dark corners of the house that is her life. She took us under the rug, behind the shed, and into the basement. Her level of vulnerability is powerful. I am in awe of this kind of giving and I am inspired by it. I wish to strengthen my own voice to the point of sharing as freely my truest parts, to take proud and complete ownership of them.

My Biggest Takeaway From 'This Here Flesh' Surprised Me

I like challenging my perspectives and I find it easy to reach for books that promise to do that. What I struggle with more are perspectives that are almost mine. Perspectives that are just adjacent to what I believe, or even the same but through a different lens. They feel like a coat I could wear comfortably and look good in even though it doesn't fit me perfectly.

I've learned, in part from this book, that I like my lenses and I'm protective of them more than I'd like to be. I'm seeing this as an invitation to let those other views live just as they are and feel no need to shift them ever so slightly to align perfectly with mine. I don't need to alter this coat. It's not mine.

I recognize this impulse of struggling with these 'almost mine' views as akin to my lifelong habit of getting nervous when I watch another black person do anything in mixed company. That idea that whatever they do somehow represents and reflects on me. That holding of breath. This recognition has been like a folded note silently passed to me that reads 'you're not breathing', and now, I can exhale.

What I now know is that...

I can see the works of other black people as truly their own. I can like it and even harder, dislike it without being a traitor. I can accept that what other black people do likely will and does reflect on me. And I can see that for the first time as the joyous burden that it is. It's the burden of belonging. It's the joy of belonging.

I can claim my tribe and be nestled in the space of belonging and be separate enough to judge it too. I now also have an understanding of those who choose to disassociate, because I now get that I can do that too. I can do all things.

I think I understood this intellectually, but I think it just sank into a knowing in my bones with this book. If for this reason alone, this book, I suspect, has changed my life.

This has made me a better reader, especially of the voices that are so close to my own that I previously almost avoided them for that very reason. This is the first time I've been able to name this and recognizing it has been a groundbreaking shift that has liberated me forever.

How do you begin to thank a person for such a thing? I cannot know. I will honor it by reading deeply from the voices that I most crave- the joy of a thirst I can finally quench. By celebrating their brilliance and listening to their truth. By letting them change me, or not. By not fearing either anymore. I can hope and try to write something one day that may plant the seeds for the same liberation in someone else. I can hope to pay it forward.

What You May Not Like About 'This Here Flesh'

I did find this book to be heavily weighed by the beliefs of Riley's Christian upbringing. I don't mind this, but I bring it up because some might. My husband, for example, loved the book but felt these religious elements were 'preachy' in such a way that they pulled him out of it. He has strong and negative feelings about religion so this makes sense. You might too.

But, as I said, it didn't bother me. Firstly, I think it's really great that she showed up in her fullness. A journey into her and her formation wouldn't be complete without all the parts, and it's clear that religion is a big one.

Secondly, I think she did it well. Her intention wasn't to preach and I didn't receive it that way. I appreciated her grappling with her own faith now (as she currently understands it) and then (as it was passed down to her). I felt her own questioning of her beliefs. I appreciated her discussion on her evolving spirituality.

Verdict: 4.5 Stars

I highly recommend this book. It is such a generous offering by Cole Arthur Riley. It reads like a chat with a friend. Yet, at the same time it is a deeply personal, spiritual, and equally intellectual commentary on trauma, life in a black and female body, love, loss, joy, and home using the one vehicle we all understand- family. It moved me.

It is, of course, also so much more than this and you can only grasp what it is by encountering it. So please read it. I got this at my library but I will soon buy it so I can always have the words near me when I want them and need them.

Let me know if you pick it up and what you think of it.

Happy reading and talk soon,

Nonjabulo