Three Dreams in the Key of G

by Marc Nash

In peace-agreement Ulster a mother rears her two daughters, as her husband is decommissioned from his violent paramilitary past.

In Florida a septuagenarian runs a community refuge for women and the authorities have surrounded it as a threat to national security. In laboratories all over the world the human genome is being dissected and decoded.

In Three Dreams in the Key of G three female voices, Mother, Crone and Creatrix, unknowingly influence each other's fates as each battles to assert themselves and discover their voices in hostile environments.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature

210 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 26, 2018

About the author

1) WORDS – voice
2) WORDS – communing
3) WORDS – emotional intelligence
4) WORDS – identity
5) WORDS – metaphor
6) WORDS – origins
7) WORDS – Origins
viii) WORDS – ideas
9) WORDS – alchemy
10)WORDS – trove
11)WORDS – meaning
12)WORDS – ambiguity
13)WORDS – stricture
14)WORDS – porousness
15)WORDS – vapour trails
16)WORDS – lyricism
17)WORDS – Being
18)WORDS – metastasis
19)WORDS – play
20)WORDS – inoculation against mortality

20 years in the counterculture working at Rough Trade Record Shop, now working in freedom of expression NGO world. I hope my books are more than just the sum of the above. I used to be a playwright, but then started writing more for dancers and physical theatre performers. I like a challenge and I like to move out of my comfort zone. Now I’m a novelist and am writing more ‘voice’ than I ever did as a playwright. Go figure!

My Booktube review site: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmpw...

Reviews

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part of the 2018 Guardian Not The Booker shortlist for which I am delighted to have been picked as a judge.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...


This book is published by Dead Ink, a UK small press focused on bringing” the most challenging and experimental new writing out from the underground and present it to our audience in the most beautiful way possible.”

It’s author Marc Nash runs a book blog (actually its much more than that) at http://sulcicollective.blogspot.com and has previously written a number of self-published books including flash fiction.

This is a highly intelligent, thoughtful and stimulating novel, one which simultaneously celebrates ideas and language.

it is narrated in first person by three characters: the Mother, Crone and Creatrix - the interleaving sections symbolically and clearly delineated. All three in a state of siege and all three musing on the topics of inheritance and nature.

The Mother is the dominant character in the novel - a Northern Irish housewife and mother of two young children, married to a chauvinistic and bigoted decommissioned loyalist paramilitary. Her story is woven through with non linear extracts from a journal she keeps which simultaneously serves to note her two childrens’ development and as an outlet for her own hitherto suppressed creative and linguistic flair.

This section contains some lovely musings on the phases of parenthood (in her case motherhood as her husband’s contribution is limited; but any enlightened father will find much to empathise with) - with musings on subjects such as buggies, party bag contents and party invite etiquette. More seriously she muses on the nature versus nurture debate and whether the debate even makes sense within a community where prejudice is passed down alongside genes.

The second character is a seventy year old English woman, living in Florida and running what is first described as a shelter for female victims of domestic violence. Her shelter is surrounded by various US law enforcement agencies in a Waco like siege in what initially seems an overreaction. But over time we learn of her backstory and her initial attempts to reset what she sees as the inherent patriarchal nature of the world by striking at the base of the very units of measurement which have delineated it and, when the digitisation of those measures renders any such attempt impossible, to strike even further at the roots of patriarchy.

The third character or characters is the voice of the four bases of the human genome project which individually and in combination hector the scientists trying to decode their structure with the futility and misguided nature of their quest. This is the most intellectual section - I particularly enjoyed a comparison of the very different role of transmission errors between DNA replication and the religions of the word, as well as what I read as a criticism of man displacing God with a deification of DNA. This section reminded me, in the level of intellectual contemplation it provoked, of Harry Mulischand his wonderful The Discovery of Heaven.

The three characters are respectively named Jean Ome (who contemplates the influences in her family name of John Hume, David Hume and Sir Alec Douglas Home, pronounced Hume), Jean Ohm who has “encountered major amplitudes of resistance” and the Human Genome. And this leads into another distinguishing part of this novel. The author is clearly in love with and in command of the English language and loves to play with homonyms, words with double meanings, word combinations and with etymology in a way that reminded me the Republic of Consciousness Prize winning Attrib. and other storiesby Eley Williams (and I struggle to pay a book a higher compliment).

In a year when the Booker judges, while not descending to the Stella(r) depths of a notorious previous panel, have placed something of a premium on accessibility, this is a book which never under estimates the intelligence of its readers and is a rigorous read as a result. I found myself reaching for a dictionary to check why a firstborn would have a faint ichorous fume and for Wikipedia to check the seventh SI base unit and I was delighted to be stretched like this.

Highly recommended.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not sure I feel qualified to review this book - Nash is clearly very clever, and in the first third of the book I often felt totally out of my depth, partly because of the number of unusual words (many of them scientific and technical) but also because the whole conceptual foundation of the book is difficult to assimilate.

There are three principal narrators, but they do not get equal shares of the text, and fortunately the one who dominates is the easiest to follow, an Ulster protestant mother of two young children from Omagh, whose diary (which appears in a jumbled sequence, the reasons for which are eventually explained, allowing Nash to withhold certain revelations until near the end) shows her frustration with the limitations of the lifestyle imposed by motherhood and her militant loyalist husband.

The second narrator is the strangest, in which a voice is given to the human genome. In this part, most of the paragraphs are preceded by letters or "words" from a DNA sequence - if there was any logic to this or any distinction between the "voices" I didn't follow it. I think these sections serve mainly to illustrate the strangeness and the impossibility of fully understanding the purpose and mechanisms of DNA, and at times this narrator is in dialogue with itself, with parallel texts in parallel columns.

The third narrator is an older British woman, who has been running a radical refuge for women in Florida, where she conceives her own wild schemes for evolving a radical and selectively bred feminist society, in another section she talks about a theoretical act of terrorism that would remove the foundations of measurement by destroying the reference meter and kilogram in Paris, which was thwarted by the changes to more abstract and certain definitions.

There is also quite a lot about language, illustrated by wordplay, and all three narrators use a lot of difficult vocabulary - I will admit that in many cases I failed to look up the words I was unfamiliar with because that would have disrupted the reading flow too much.

Thanks to Gumble's Yard for bringing this fascinating book to my attention.

[Fraser Simons · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did a video review of this: https://youtu.be/l4tofhmSm6o

Long and the short of it is it’s a unique and excellent novel

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I needed to understand the interaction of the phrases. Across the paragraphs. The chapters. Which bits were relevant to where in the chain. To note things that for now didn’t seem to portend anything significant, but which were sure to come back and hit me straight between the eyes when I least expected it. When I wasn’t looking.

Three Dreams in the Key of G is a staggeringly ambitious book. It is told by three narrators (I guess there's a clue in the title). The most accessible of these is a mother of two in Ulster around the turn of the millennium. She has two daughters and a husband she refers to as “the troubles (small ’t’)”. This part of the narrative takes the form of non-linear excerpts from a secret journal she keeps as her two daughters grow up (she dates the entries using Roman numerals - in a Protestant household! This is one of her small acts of rebellion). All parents will relate to this section. The author himself was the primary carer for his own children and many of the passages have the ring of “been there, done that” and are very funny (e.g. the etiquette about the contents of party bags). Our narrator worries about how her children will grow up. What part will genes play? What part will her influence play? The author has said one of the things he was exploring in this thread of the novel was how the environment in Ulster (a place he acknowledges he has never visited) predetermined the nurture part of “nature vs. nurture” and questioned the whole supposed battle between the two when nurture was hardwired to one outcome. For me, this didn’t quite come over (I heard him talk about it in an interview, but I didn’t quite get it from the book).

The second narrator is an older woman in Florida in a refuge for victims of male abuse. She is putting stuff out on the web but is surrounded by US forces who see her as a threat to national security. This might be because it seems the community is looking for to edit the human genome and remove the male gender.

Our first two narrators are Jean Ome and Jean Ohm. Both stories have a theme of genetics. The final narrator is the human genome, in four parts, A, T, C and G. This narrator mocks the humans trying to understand it. It seems to take delight in the way man tries to impose order on creation when, at the DNA level, as with subatomic particles, everything reduces to chance. These sections are far more intellectual than the others raising all kinds of philosophical and ethical questions to give you something to think about.

This is a book for those who love word play. But, be warned, it is very sophisticated word play. I consider myself, perhaps wrongly, to have an above average vocabulary. I read 3-4 books each week and it is rare that I have to look up a word as I read. But this author knows many, many more words than I do and is also not afraid to invent a few of his own (if Shakespeare and Milton could do, why can’t he, I suppose?). I had to give up looking up words I didn’t know as it was spoiling the book for me and, to be fair, you can sort of guess the meaning of many of them (but you do have to pause to think about it). Reading on a Kindle would be an idea here as you can simply tap on a word to see its definition. There are many, many delightful sentences (lovers of Eley Williams’ Attrib. and Other Stories will like them). There are several that, for my taste, go over the top, including some that don’t reveal their meaning even after 2 or 3 readings. Normally, that kind of thing would not bother me as I am happy to just run with the general sense and atmosphere of the narrative, but here I found it was preventing me from getting that sense and atmosphere.

As you read, it becomes clear that the stories are linking in different ways, sometimes just because they all consider genetics and the mysteries of life, sometimes because the stories actually interlink. I found myself going back several times to check things I had read earlier (hence the quote at the start of this review).

There are so many things to like about this book: the cleverness of the language and the word play, the ideas, the humour (as examples). But, for this reader, the whole is slightly less than the sum of the parts and it loses something in the plethora of obscure words and complexity of the language and also because I found it difficult to differentiate the voices of the two human narrators, both of whom seem to be consumed by the author's desire to play with words. I am the first to admit that that the first of these is my shortcoming, not one of the book, but these are what make it less than 5 stars for me. Close, though.

[Jackie Law · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three Dreams in the Key of G, by Marc Nash, is a book that took me some time to engage with. The language used is complex in places with much play on words not often employed in storytelling. There is a reason for this which when revealed left me exhilarated. The ideas presented and their presentation will not easily be eclipsed.

The story utilises three voices. The most accessible is that of a young mother living in small town, small minded, mid Ulster as the peace process is brokered. She is married to a staunch Loyalist, despising his hate filled rhetoric but silently. Where once she had dreams of attending university in Belfast, her family vetoed this plan due to the possible dangers a young girl could be faced with living alone in a big city. These dangers concerned the freedom from family watchfulness, freedom from the ever present threat of their opprobrium, and what such freedom might enable her to become.

The second voice is that of the human genome project – somehow the author makes this work. It explores how humans seek to understand and thereby control what they are, their essential make up. Man wishes to meddle to prolong life, to affect what he creates. There is still much that he does not comprehend about what makes him what he is. This voice is resonant with irony and wit. The details bring man down to size, mocking his earnest endeavours. However marvellous scientific discoveries may be their impact will be shadowed by other influences.

The third voice is that of an elderly lady running a refuge for victims of domestic violence in America. The state is suspicious of her attempts to escape the deleterious effects of overt masculinity. They regard her venture as a threat.

The mother writes in her journal of her thoughts and experiences with her two young daughters. Having accepted this path for her life, as is expected of the women in her family and community, she rails against its constrictions. She aims to raise her children well, with little help from her husband: “the troubles (small ‘t’)“. She ponders what her girls have inherited from their parents and how this will affect them as they develop, what language they will learn to speak.

“Cooing and trilling, sound cantered asunder like spiderlings ballooning on their silk threads. But gradually she anchors her vocal drift, as she ingests the intoned gobbets spilling from my tongue. I watch her kneading the sounds, hands to mouth, a second, invisible umbilical from me to her. Passing along my dead language. That parched parchment from my cracked and parched lips that will not quench her thirst for congruence. For I recognise it will only succeed in re-sealing the esophagal aperture magically parted by her genes.”

“A dead language emanating from someone who scarcely lives a life. But even this is not the mummifying cause. The language, my language, is sententious and doctrinaire. Replete with exclamations, directives and interrogatives.”

“So the everyday arpeggio of parenting inevitably thrums and frets my stretched nerve strings. Single noted, sharp and shrill, instead of flat and even. A drone all the same. Off-kilter rather than merely off key. Whatever the issue at hand, the tilting ground, the mittened gauntlet thrown down is ratcheted up into a disproportionate response on my part. Since, no matter how much it is cloaked with the pathognomy of tiredness or frustration, behind each and every one of my emissions flares the filament of anger. The incendiary of rage and dejection at myself and what I have become.”

As the mother goes through her days – shopping, school runs, desolate beach trips, daytime TV – the genome project churns out its findings, musing on why it is being attempted.

“For there is only Sex and Death. Passing on and passing over and vice versa. How your trepidation over mortality feeds into your procreative drive. The pair intertwined round one another like poison ivy.”

“I deal in the architecture of potentia, where you are grounded in the material shoring of tenure. See, the key difference between you and I is that life and time stretch everlasting into the future, for me as DNA and you as my prized host bloodstock. But not for you as individuals.”

In the refuge women are also procreating, but not with those who drove them to reside in this place. Their choices, their autonomy to make such choices, are what the state sees as a threat. Women should exist for man’s pleasure and the perpetuation of his genes.

This is remarkable writing that explores man’s proclivities and purported cleverness. Each relationship is shown to be one sided, supposed understanding a reflection of self. Man can draw the map and tinker around the edges of the detail, but how much of true note can be changed?

All of this is explored, dissected, and presented in language rich with depth and meaning. The conclusions are salient yet, when considered dispassionately, unsurprising. Man chooses to ignore so much in plain sight as he strokes his prejudices and vanities.

A book that soars and leaves a frisson in its contrails. A challenging, stunning, wholly satisfying creation.

[K.D. Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Vigorous Workout

Marc Nash (Extra-Curricular) is an intellectual. Nowhere is that fact more obvious than in his most recent novel, Three Dreams in the Key of G. Here, three narrative streams coalesce to provide some of the deepest existential philosophies you will find, all the while remaining grounded in the everyday world.

The first of the three narrators, Jean, is an elderly radical woman, known for her group and online movement. She has survived a difficult life into her golden years and now has the FBI on her as well as other government entities due to the ideas she propagates. It is these ideas and memes that give her a sense of being. She is thoroughly adamant about the superiority of women and even speaks to the point of DNA in this observation. Mostly however, she finds her identity as the value of the information she puts out, a collection of ideas and memes that she believes will live past her own life and spread to significant ends.

In the second narrative stream, entities known as A, C, G, and T converse and discourse over one another to determine the essence of life itself. Collectively, they call themselves the Creatrix.

A, C, G, and T, in real life represent the four nucleotide bases of DNA (Adenine, Cystosine, Guanine and Thymine.) Each nucleotide speaks in its own way, sometimes varying by the how the author arranges script on the page. Each of these characters delves deeply into the existence of man as well as DNA itself, often baring philosophical secrets haughtily. A, C, G, and T rail against mankind and also among themselves in comical ways.

The last narrator is the heart of the story. A mother of two very young daughters, one five and the other not even a toddler, keeps a personal journal that she reveals all to. The only one or thing in her life to which she does; her daughters are too young and her husband is distant, seemingly by her own choice. The focus of the novel is on women with men left to play the role of outsider.

It is through this last narrator that we feel the essence of day to day living, even as she dissects it in her journal. Here for example is the haunting, familiar picture of a five-year old at her mother's make-up table.

"There she was, sat at my dressing table. In front of my hinged mirrored tryptich, that gateway to the source of identity. The family Omphalos. For I too had sat at such a mirror, a child seeking reassurance of my mother's continued existence when confronting her temporary absence from the house."

It is through her trials and day-to-day living that we feel the inheritance of mankind as she documents faithfully in her diary. We read the importance of diapers and all that comes along with them. We despair at the exactitude of children's party gift bags after a choice goes wrong for her, and we raise the alarm at how an otherwise ordinary day can turn to near tragedy by a simple raisin on the floor. She documents motherhood in all it's essence.

Besides the existential dilemma that all of the narrators try to combat, each in their unique way, the narratives also have delightful word play in common through-out the novel. The word play makes it seem as if the author had numerous idiomatic expressions going on in his mind as he wrote each character and I thoroughly enjoyed all of them.

Finally, this could be said to be a book about motherhood of all kinds, three specific examples given to us with narrators in all their elegance and frailties.

At the beginning and end of the book we see sequences of A, C, G, and T together as in DNA. Their speaking not ending, but continuing to convey that which is and will continue to be.

[Rosamund · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Slow down and pay attention." I read fast and some of the time I need a book that forces me take things at slower pace. So I appreciate a novel like this with multiple perspectives, a non linear narrative, and interplay of ideas and language. This is in part a book about language and the wordplay is constant. It is a long time since I read a book where I found myself stopping to look words up in a dictionary. This could have been rebarbative but the book is more than an intellectual exercise. It is also a tender book with an exceptional depiction of parenthood at its heart.

[Courtney Ferriter]

I'm not going to rate this book, as I am friendly with the author and feel unable to rate the book objectively for that reason. I did enjoy it overall, and I would recommend it if you like novels of ideas, experimental fiction, and/or linguistically playful texts with rhetorical flourish.

This novel presents the alternating narratives of Jean Ome, a harried mother of two in Northern Ireland; Jean Ohm, an older Valerie Solanas-style radical feminist who runs an organization for abused women in Florida; and the human genome itself. Each narrative is concerned in multiple ways with reproduction, replication, and repetition. Each character shares a focus on language, survival, and possibility. As the Ulster mother reflects toward the end of the novel, "The human default is always set to reproduction [...] Survival and reproduction. Survival as reproduction" (185).

I found the human genome the most interesting of the three characters, but the other two characters are also well done. The narrative about Jean the mother does an excellent job of capturing aspects of parenthood, especially how one can lose one's own sense of identity in tending to children. Jean in Florida who runs the feminist organization is the most unreliable of the three narrators, and as such, she drives much of the narrative tension of the novel. At various points, the reader is left to wonder: Wait, is she running a cult? Is the FBI really after her?, Did she murder her husband?

In some ways (although I don't know whether Marc has read this), this novel reminded me of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives in its emphasis on linguistic repetition with a difference. If you are a fan of early Stein or contemporary experimental fiction, I think you would probably enjoy this book.

[Ted Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

You see the mind-fields a mental experiment can land you in?

I began it on a Saturday night. I wasn’t sleeping well, was woken by bongos at 9am. Waiting for the coffee machine to warm up, I leaned out the window, saw the Hackney Half-Marathon going along Downs Road, life passing by. I brought the book back to bed with me, I had a headache, the bongos went on. Do you know that Cure song, Babble? I think it may have been the B-side to Love Song, the one Adele murdered. Maybe, maybe not.

Three Dreams in the Key of G presents itself as an experimental novel, voiced in three alternating parts, three monologues, all female. There are no chapters as such. The first, the dominant voice and the most immediately accessible, is from a young mother of two in Omagh in the North of Ireland, beginning not long after most of the lead has stopped flying in the 1990s, the troubles replaced by the shopping trolley/stroller wars and the political quandary of what to put into a post-child’s-birthday-party take-home bag. This is her home town, she’s never left, except for the annual trip to a holiday cottage on the Antrim coast. She never pursued her dream of college in Belfast. Instead she got married to the boy next door, an ex-hood for the UDA or the UVF or the Red Hand Gang. Maybe family’s important to her, but who needs family like that? But what if there’s nothing else? How long after the GFA all of this happens seems irrelevant, time exhibiting elasticity and compression all at once, the wider world moving sluggishly forward, her immediate environment only changing on a geological scale.

Other voices come from the human genome, GATC, the four bases of DNA, adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine, as one by one they pass commentary on our pointless existence, smugly dispensing pearls before swine, dismissing us in our irrelevance. I don’t exist, see, they tell us, there is no such thing as a genome. But somehow you sense that they're what’s behind the curtain of consciousness, snickering just the other side of this veil of tears and laughter, biting down hard on their fingers. The third is from a woman running a refuge for abused women in Florida, which she claims has become an independent democratic community, which she believes is seen as some kind of a radical terrorist outfit by the government, which she denies is a cult, whilst behaving all the time like a cult leader. You initially get the impression the author has read too much Joyce and Beckett, but you push on regardless and by the quarter-way point, these interconnected tales begin to wrap themselves around you, they coalesce, and then you’re caught, they've got you. Because Three Dreams in the Key of G is not something you experience immediately, in the way of a thriller, a page-turner with an inciting incident and a hero’s journey and conflict and resolution and all that. Oh, no. And so, you read on.

A lot's been made of the wordplay, but that isn’t it for me, although it’s most certainly there. In fact, if anything, Nash occasionally goes a little bit overboard with it, almost threatening to derail the Beckettian stream-of-consciousness effect, although he does manage to hang onto the track. But more than the wordplay, it’s a hypnotic fever dream. You slowly turn the pages, your fingers shaking, hoping that something will go in, finding little respite at first, because it’s only later that you feel what’s really going on here. Your understanding lies in not understanding, but in letting it do its thing, in allowing it into your head and your heart and your gut. In surrendering to the rhythm of the writing, its music and poetry, its repetition and its poetry. Its repetition and its music. And its music and its repetition. Do you see?

Oh good. The bongos have stopped. The Nurofen’s working. Now I can relax. Four stars.

I received a copy of Three Dreams in the Key of G from the author in exchange for a fair and honest review.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three Dreams in the Key of G is a lot of things: ambitious, baffling, addictive, occasionally beautiful, occasionally infuriating. I've read few other books to which I feel comfortable comparing it -- Milan Kundera's Immortality (a weaker achievement than Nash's) and Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake (a stronger achievement than Nash's) come to mind, the Kundera because it (like this) is a novel of ideas, the Kingsnorth because it (like this) is a novel of linguistic daring.

I feel like the knotted wordplay would've been better suited to a third-person telling, given that there are three distinct first-person narratives. Nash's voice is so strong, and his linguistic choices so pointed, that it never felt like three distinct figures, despite their distinct experiences. On one hand, this still works just fine, because the snarled, alliterative, punning voice indicates a complex single being -- as though the Mother, Crone and Creatrix personas are less characters than three strands of a braid of identity. On the other, I found myself struggling to orient myself in the narrative at times and being distracted with wondering whether and how the telling might have worked better in third person. Regardless, there were long stretches in the book where I found myself giving over to it, being seduced by the spry way specific words and images would echo throughout the prose. There is such linguistic energy in the novel, it would occasionally feel like impromptu rap spun from the mouth of a genius, like hearing Eminem throw it down might somehow feel no less fitting that seeing it ordered out in sentences and paragraphs. As a result, whatever the novel's successes or failures at characterization (and there are sublime moments of characterization in it -- I'm thinking, in particular, of the moment when when the mother sees the children playing near, not with, her daughter on the beach, breaking down the gestures and spaces as a kind of hesitant, inquiring ritual between the children), and however lucid or thorny its philosophical underpinnings, the highlight is Nash's abandon with language and his willingness to treat words and phrases as Rubik's Cubes to be reconfigured, as utterances in a cultural and historical call and response.

I found myself become a more attentive reader while reading it, and grateful to be reading a novel of linguistic iconoclasm, hellbent on conjuring something new from the rubble. Books like this one are rare. And as maddening and dense as it often was, it was also -- as often -- capable of exhilarating, even moving flights of perception and delicacy.

*This novel was given to me by the author, with whom I've been friends for some months at the time of this reading and review.

[lévi-civita · Rating 5 out of 5]

My thoughts are really sprawling in many directions with this engaging book. I loved the parallel encoding of the three Gs worlds: the way they were coupled and textually paradoxical. For example, the way the mother seems to dessicate as she writes herself into her daughters and her journal, while the nucleotides seemed to be consistently (necessarily?) liquid. I also got the sense of the genome as this uniquely pervasive and immanent Kantian thing-in-itself. Really, I will have to read this again.

[Ellie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well this was different.

I started this while very tired, got a dozen pages in and had to stop. Then one day when I was more awake, I read the blurb, read some reviews, and started again. This time it made more sense, but I still found it difficult.

The writing is unlike most I read, a stream-of-consciousness wordplay which requires either a vocabulary that is beyond mine or a readily-available dictionary. The loose plot follows three 'stories', that of a young woman raising two daughters, an older woman running a women's survival colony in the US, and the human genome itself offering snide remarks as scientists try to decipher it's meaning. Though at times beautiful, this is by no means an accessible book, and it didn't draw me in.

It's one of the best examples of language wordplay I've ever read, but it's difficult and takes your full attention. Not for light reading, but I did enjoy it more page-by-page, and felt a sense of achievement at the end. I'm sure I missed many of the jokes, themes and more obscure parts of this book, and would not be averse to rereading sometime in future.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm going to be doing a bigger review, but wanted to throw something in here. This is a very ambitious book. There are some great concepts of motherhood, marriage, patriarchy, DNA, and buying a stroller(?).

However, it is all stream of conscious. That is just not my bag. I appreciate the work that goes into writing in this style, but I just can't get into it. If you like that stuff, you'll love this book.