For what was perhaps the first time in my life, I read a book with a trigger warning that I actually benefited from. I didn’t know, at the time, that I was going to be grateful for the warning, but it helped prepare me for the in-depth exploration of trauma and mental illness that followed. So this review, too, has a trigger warning. Self-harm and suicidal ideation feature prominently in this review, because they both feature prominently in the novel.
Through some gift of fortune I’ll never understand, I’ve never really struggled with my mental health. The same can not be said for quite a few people in my life. Depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide have impacted (sometimes directly) many people who I am close to. Though I haven’t experienced first hand the thoughts and the pain, I’ve been there. I’ve felt the hopelessness. The fear. I’ve tried to put back lives broken by decisions that can not be taken back.
I don’t know Lindsey Ellis’s life, I don’t know what she’s been through, or what she’s struggled with. But I can only assume, having read this book, that she has struggled with things experienced by people who mean a great deal to me. If she hasn’t, then here ability to empathize with emotion she hasn’t personally experienced is remarkable. Whether she has or not, her ability to articulate those feelings is staggering.
This book was, at times, painful – and not at all what I expected.
But, I say none of this to condemn the book. I think what I got out of the book is what she wanted me to get out it. I think she was very effective in achieving the desired effect.
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In an alternate reality where Bush is brought down by a whistleblower/journalist/conspiracy theorist named Nils Ortega, aliens have arrived on Earth. Ortega’s estranged daughter, Cora Sabino, gets pulled into the story against her will when she encounters the alien and becomes his translator. Things happen. I greatly enjoyed the first book in the series – though it felt like I read it two years ago.
I can’t stress how much of this book is about trauma. Cora has PTSD from events in the first book, and Ampersand (who she is psychically tethered to) is struggling with his own fears and trauma related to the death of his (sorta) mate and being a kind of refugee trapped on Earth. Their emotional and mental wounds are kind of bleeding into one another, growing, consuming them.
It’s hard to read, at times. I liked the book, as I liked the first one, and I like Cora. This book forces you to vicariously, hopelessly, watch someone fall apart and not know how to put herself back together. And I don’t want to give away too much about the story, but there are no easy answers. This is the kind of story where bad things happen to good people, and the characters you like most don’t necessarily win in the end.
And then, somehow, Ellis seems to end this book on a – I don’t even know if it’s correct to categorize it this way – positive note. I felt almost hopeful at the end. All the pain didn’t disappear. Nothing was magically fixed. Cora didn’t get better because she just picked herself up and tried harder – mental health doesn’t work that way, after all. But I did feel like she saw a path forward; a way to use the losses she’s experienced to find meaning in what she has left, and what she may not yet have attained.
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I fear I’ve overstated the emotional weight of this book.
I don’t want to make you think that there’s nothing to this book apart from the emotional pain of its characters, because it’s more than that. There’s humor, here. And happiness. There are moments of real sweetness and yearning. And, at least for me, it ends on a note of hope.
But, for me, it brought out a lot of personal emotions and memories. But I think it was a good book, and I’ll read the third when it comes out (next year, I believe).
