This book isn’t about what happened. It’s an elegy, a lament for the dead. It’s strange and metaphoric. It shifts often, switching perspective, characters, even plot, so that the experience of reading almost feels like floating (or struggling through) a wave. I selected this book because I really loved The Old Drift, and I would still highly recommend that novel. This novel is different from that one in almost every way, but for the fact that it was written by the same talented writer. Overall, despite the beautiful writing, I wasn’t as in love with this book – something was a bit TOO tumultuous about it for me. And yet, I know it will remain with me for a while, which is always a sign of a masterful novel.
Cassandra is 12, and her brother 7, when he dies, tragically, while they are alone. This isn’t a mystery novel, although it contains one. Cassandra does tell about what happened, but also, she doesn’t want to talk about what happened – this novel is about how it FEELS. How it felt to lose her brother, when she was only 12 years old. Later, how it felt when her white mother created an organization devoted to finding the brother that Cassandra witnessed die – because through mysterious circumstances, the family never had a body to satisfy her parents (at least, her mother) that he was actually dead. How it felt when her black father eventually leaves her family, in what seems to be a mostly kind but definitely split of her family. How it feels for her, as an adult, to work for her mother’s foundation, which is built on what she knows to be a lie (her mother continues to claim that her brother is missing, not dead). How it feels to be mixed race – indeed, how she even grows conscious of her own difference and similarity to each of her parents.
The second half of the book begins to switch perspectives, as we are introduced to a man who shares the name of her brother. Perhaps, maybe, multiple men with that name, who may or may not have intersecting lives of their own. The strands of the story weave together and apart, a dream with in a dream. It’s really hard to describe what happens in the novel without saying what happens – and again, it’s not about what happens in this novel. The writer wants to tell you how it FEELS.
It’s a moving elegy. It’s less successful as a straightforward novel – best for poetic moods, or those moments when you want to someone to capture what it feels like to grieve. It’s full of longing, sorrow, and inevitability. Serpell is insanely talented, and I’ll continue to seek out what she writes, including more experimental work like this.
