Novel on Yellow Paper

by Stevie Smith

Alternative cover editions for this ISBN can be found here and here

It is 1935. Pompey works as a secretary for a magazine publisher and scribbles down her thoughts on yellow paper. The voice of the thirties rings out as she chatters on about the Catholic Church, sex education, Nazi Germany, Euripides and all sorts of things. But most of all she thinks of love.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Novels, Literature, British Literature, 20th Century, Literary Fiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971), was an English poet and novelist.

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

Sometimes it's not what a book is about that keeps me reading, but how it's written. The trouble is, it's much harder to talk about how a book is written than to simply tell what it's about.

About, about. There are a lot of 'abouts' in the beginning of this review, aren't there? But 'about' is a word we associate with stories since forever. What's it about, what's it about, we always want to know. And don't you, chaps, don't you keep reading reviews here on goodreads just to find out what such-and-such books are about?

But what a story seems to be about is sometimes not the same as what it really tells, and then the way it is told becomes the key to what it's really about.

'Really'. That's another word that is striking out for glory in this here piece of screen typing. Does it deserve to be repeated, chaps? Are you wondering if Stevie Smith uses the word 'really' much? She really muchly does, is the light and frothy answer. The word 'really', odd as it might seem given the underlying seriousness of its meaning, helps, along with some other idiosyncratic style tics, to make her writing sound the opposite of serious-o.

'Sound'. So why do I say 'sound', chappies? Well, I used the word 'sound' just now, or just then — since a few moments have passed since I used it, because I'd used the word 'underlying' just before. Now 'underlying', that's a really serious-sounding word, don't you think? There's rarely anything light or frothy involved when it comes to the word 'underlying'.

Still, in spite of that last sentence, the light and frothy waves that ride on the top of the ocean rolled into my mind just now, and I am thinking as I type, how they manage to hide tons of 'underlying' stuff, great huge depths of fear, and much much foreboding. And, yes, that fierce and grimmig death lies under those light and frothsome waves. O, how much we bode, fore and aft, on that chappy, Death-o.

Mais oui, mais oui, there are indeed a lot of thoughts on dying in this autobiographical novel. For yes, what we've got here, chappies, is a kind of memoir story in which poet Stevie Smith, or Pompey Casmilus, as she likes to call herself, rattles back and forth over the first thirty years of her life, ostensibly while working in an office in London in 1936, an office where there is a lot of spare yellow paper just waiting to be scribbled on.

And you could miss the ever so grimmig death theme quite easily because of all the fun and frothy yarns that Pompey spills onto her bright and yellow pages whenever the Boss is napping. It's quite a feat, really, her ability to be funny while experiencing deep anguish. O yes, chappies, there's no doubt about the existential anguish that underlies everything here. But Pompey, she just rattles on, endlessly churning fear into frothy fun.

And here's a fun coincidence, as often happens in my reading life. I read this office-typed novel right after I'd been reading the work of another anguished woman poet, also living in London, and also working in an office as a typist. Yes, Elizabeth Smart, she of By Grand Central Station fame, describes this self-same fun-fear see-saw ride, which she associates, interestingly, with Samuel Beckett:
How can Beckett be so witty in his agony? Now I know. Once you start speaking, of course, the agony lessens –memory of it is near, but relief makes laughter. Already tragedy turns to comedy, a better form.

I felt that Pompey, chatting away to us reader chappies on those reams of yellow paper, got a good measure of relief out of her monologue.

…………………………………………………………

Have I told you enough about how this book is written for you to understand what it's about, chappies? Can I add anything at all? Perhaps if I said that Pompey's novel is the longer and funnier version of the poem Stevie is most famous for, 'Not Waving But Drowning', it might help...

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much farther out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

 Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

[Alwynne]

Published in 1936, poet Stevie Smith’s first novel’s fairly distinctive, its stream-of-consciousness style’s linked it to Virginia Woolf, sometimes giving the impression that Smith is Woolf’s suburban incarnation. But its digressive structure, reliant on playful or jarring juxtapositions, along with Smith’s combination of the lyrical, highly referential and broadly colloquial, all jostling with flashes of bizarre imagery, abrupt imaginative leaps and Joycean echoes reminded me far more of early stirrings of British experimental writing; while the mix of harshly satirical, macabre, bleak and brittle undertones seemed akin to the intense vision of Anna Kavan.

But, although it was frequently fascinating with impressive elements, it's not a particularly comfortable, or even always likeable, read. The central character Pompey, a secretary from the London suburbs, is clearly some version of Smith but what kind of version’s unclear. Pompey’s often charming, loyal to her friends and family, free-spirited, and adventurous but she’s also viciously judgemental and riddled with peculiarly English forms of prejudice. Notably anti-Semitism which crops up in semi-polite form very early in the novel, and was enough to make me immediately wary, but Smith’s representation of anti-Semitism is more complicated than I’d feared: later in the story, a holiday in Nazi-run Berlin causes Pompey to confront her own attitudes towards Jewish friends and acquaintances, and reflect on the potentially devastating consequences of the omnipresent, unthinking discrimination at the heart of British society. All the same it’s a difficult, uneasy portrayal but unease is central to what Smith delights in exploring - the contradictions, flaws and menacing aspects of 1930s’ Britain. Yet Smith’s character also has a flippant, artless side, serving up quirky anecdotes, comments on fashion, food and sex, outings with friends, and weekend parties in the country, almost as if Smith’s parodying or reinventing the kind of middlebrow women’s books so popular at the time. Another prominent strand in Smith’s inventive narrative are musings on literature and writing, poetry, Euripides, Racine, Goethe, D.H. Lawrence’s fiction, and a host of other literary topics. This is definitely not a book that will suit many tastes, I’m not sure it really suited mine, I found it slightly exhausting at times, infuriating at others, but it intrigued me enough to make me consider tracking down the sequel.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stevie Smith is rightly hailed as one of the finest poets of the 20thC, noted among many others for ‘Not Waving But Drowning’, a humorous and melancholy poem that found a second life as a Manic Street Preachers lyric. This short extemporised novel is droll, erudite, and exquisitely modernist in that charming manner of pre-war English fiction, helped along by Smith’s own wit (indebted to her reading of Dorothy Parker), and bizarre Latin coinages that seem entirely another world away now. A charming read.

[Shawn Mooney (Shawn Breathes Books)]

I did not get very far with this. I couldn’t get a firm enough footing to enjoy anything about it. Way too many references to people places and things that I had no idea about. The writing was lively enough, but I almost never knew what the hell was going on.

What does it say that this is the second of my favorite writer Barbara Pym’s favorite novels that I haven’t gotten along with at all and bailed on? (The other was Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow.)

[Zanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an ethnographic treasure. A fabulously unconventional young lower-middle class White woman with no pretensions to objectivity or representativeness narrates her thoughts as-they-come in England between the wars. As historical document, it's rubies and opals

Whether or not it is enjoyable depends on the reader. Smith is a 'foot-off-the-ground person' and generously warns off the other sort. She does not complete her thoughts or her stories and they follow one another in no kind of order. Her style is never serious, ranging from whimsical and disarmingly self-deprecating to crisply sardonic, especially on the social position of women and on sex.

On the latter subjects I admire her, as on friendship and fellowship between women, but on politics and literature I cannot agree with her, though she speaks with clarity and some insight. I find her an extremely easy author to read; I run my eyes over the page and gather the meaning entire; I feel it leap from her heart to mine, but many readers will feel differently!

[Juliana · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review: https://theblankgarden.com/2017/05/12...

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very neat book where an intelligent witty 1930s lady digresses about various topics such as nazi germany, sex, ancient greek theatre, relationships, the church and her cool aunt. wonderful turn of phrase and style, and i especially liked the part where she says that if you want to read a normal book you should read something else instead.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stevie Smith was an English poet. Her collected works was recently published and I started casually skimming the volume, but it was NOVEL ON YELLOW PAPER, her first novel, that I wanted to start with. It was supposedly her response to a publisher she brought her poems to who suggested she write a novel instead, so she did, using the yellow paper from the office she worked in as assistant to some magazine executive. You can tell her prose is the work on a poet. It’s highly stylized in a tone that appears conversational but is dense with repetition, word play and almost the singsong quality of an oral tradition. She’s got personality and opinions about everything from Greek tragedy to sex and marriage. Her aunt, who’s described as a lioness, and her suitors float in and out of her narrative, which isn’t as much a narrative as a chatty encounter with an erudite and intelligent kook. And she’s so English that I felt as if a translator is needed to fully understand her. But even without a plot or, speaking for myself, a firm handle on what was going on, I loved her company.

[Eileen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to put anything about this one into words. "Novel" is more or less a misnomer; this is a discursive, stream-of-consciousness narrative, obviously pretty autobiographical, running over a wide variety of Smith's/Pompey Casimilus's experiences in England and Germany in the 30s. Interesting, half shocking, contemporary thoughts on anti-semitism, forming and unforming relationships, work, etc. She makes judgments throughout on her readers, telling straightforward plot-driven people to put the book down but the undecideds to keep going--I returned it to the library already or I'd go get the quote. It's worth reading.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bought this for the cover picture - on my copy detail from 'Woman in Yellow' by Tamara de Lempicka. This is Catherine Carrington by Dora Carrington - and just as enticing! Well done Virago. Neither Stevie Smith nor Pompey Casmilus is to be summed up by the likes of me. Finishing it sent me to the poetry books and I can find only one book in the house with any of her poems - British Poetry since 1945 - so these three poems are possibly the only I have ever read. Easy to read but hard hitting on the heart and brain - no book at bedtime as I had to take up another book before I could sleep.....

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, it's a novel, and it's written on yellow paper, but beyond that it's nothing like what you'd expect, unless you're expecting awesomeness, which it pretty much delivers.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully idiosyncratic writing in the vein of the Joyce/Eliot-influenced modernism of the 1930s - even more reminiscent of Djuna Barnes but that may just be lumping all eccentric women of that period together. Impossible to say what it is about, but the narrative voice becomes increasingly funny and endearing, a breathless falling-over-itself colloquial tone that the writer said is intended to evoke everyday speech rather than high literary style, but you don't know anyone that talks like this unless you hang around with upper middle-class young British women who have somehow become displaced in time by 3/4s of a century or so. I may not be doing it justice but I am rushing to get back to it.

Next day: finished. Really "startlingly original" though that sounds like lazy book review boilerplate (not as a bad as "finely observed first novel"). I am also somehow extra fascinated with people who lived just outside my range of experience, or barely overlapped - had I somehow met Stevie Smith in London in 1970 when I was ten years old, would it have made any impression and would I remember? Nonetheless, the possibility is intriguing.

[Paula Bardell-Hedley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rather like Pompey Casmilus, the narrator of this slightly off-kilter stream of consciousness novel, which in Stevie Smith's opinion makes me a “foot-off-the-ground” sort of person. Not only is this a jolly good thing to be, but it is wholly necessary if one is to fully appreciate her exuberant chatter.

This was Smith's first novel, printed in 1936, and could perhaps be described as a frenetic, not quite fictional, ingeniously funny memoir. The sagacious Pompey (secretary to magazine publisher, Sir Phoebus Ullwater) confabulates on topics as diverse as sex, The Church, Nazism, single women, death, matrimony and oh so much more. She discusses and analyses the people in her life - characters quite obviously based on Smith's actual friends and relatives – and leaves the reader feeling altogether exhilarated, enervated and not infrequently bewildered.

I expect people either love or loathe this book. I loved it!

NB The text is peppered with German words and expressions (Latin and French, too), but this wasn't a problem for me because my Kindle offered instant translation.

[Darren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really a novel, more a series of (very) loosely connected anecdotes/observations/commentaries/diversions etc. What it most reminded me of was the script for a stand-up routine (albeit a wryly rather than laugh-out-loudly funny one). I enjoyed the authentic feel of a "voice" from the 1930's and the uniqueness of the voice itself, and the poetic style. Quite short, but needed to be read slowly to fully appreciate. This is a "keeper" though, and I suspect that next time I read it I might bump it up to 4 stars (especially if between-times I swot up on my German!).
(Oh, and it inspired me to go and read Phèdre!)

re-read (Dec'23)
still only 3.5 stars and rounded down, mainly cos the latter stages seemed rather self-indulgent with lots of more poetic content creeping in, which was straying from the novel remit.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one singular, whacked-out book. It is as digressive as Tristram Shandy, with hints of the anarchic humor of Raymond Queneau, or Flann O'Brien, yet it's the product of a fresh and strange vision.

[Troy Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jagged stream of consciousness just isn’t really my thing, I’m afraid.

[Helen]

This is the fourth time I've read this book, and every time I've read it I've had a very different, extreme reaction. The first time I read it, it just annoyed me. The second time, I loved it. The third time, I hated it. I think I was right in a note I made on the second read, that if you approach this novel as you would a 'conventional' novel, you'll want to fling it across the room. You have to let yourself be wooed by narrator Pompey Casmilus' quicksilver mind - "For this book is the talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts come, the way I said, and the people come too, and come and go..."

Stevie Smith's worldview is unique. Her language darts and leaps. This is a sort of 'stream of consciousness', but where Woolf is mostly serious, Smith likes to tease and poke fun. She clearly enjoys playing with language, stretching it, juggling with it.

"How richly compostly loamishly sad were those Victorian days, with a sadness not nerve-irritating like we have today...Yes, always someone dies, someone weeps, in tune with the laurels dripping, and the tap dripping, and the spout dripping into the water-butt, and the dim gas flickering greenly in the damp conservatory."

In order to enjoy the book, you have to be the type of person who likes discursive writing, who doesn't demand a linear plot (there's no plot at all, in this book), and you have to be prepared to accept Smith's heightened, artificial way of writing. As Pompey says, 'there's not a person nor a thing in this book that ever stepped outside of this book. It's just all out of my head'. Although there are clear autobiographical elements and references, the reader is very much made aware that this is art, not real life.

Stevie Smith delights in teasing, in leading the reader by the nose and seeing if we're up to the job. To see if we're willing to take part in her game.

In its way, this book is as innovative with language (and with the novel form) as those by Woolf or Joyce, but Smith does it with a wink and a sly grin. It's also often very funny, often with a sharp, satirical edge - "'Do You Know that there Are 3,432,521 illegitimate children in the UK? Please send a donation to the Secretary,' etc. That appeal came out in one of our papers, and when I showed it to Sir Phoebus he said 'Hurrah! Who says England's going pansy?'" Her boss, Sir Phoebus, is clearly based on Smith's own employer, and her description of office life rings totally true - "We indulge in the utmost limit of boredom, he in his room and I in mine, and stagger out when tea time comes, as it must, however it comes, whether rung for on the house phone, or trundled in by the hired girl, that's like an angel of grace breaking in on the orgy of boredom to which my soul is committed."

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the idea of this book more than the book itself: I love that a British woman in modernist times was able to write a book though she wasn't independently wealthy. I love the conceit, still relevant as ever, of a creative work written while one is trudging away at their uncreative work. Stevie Smith delivers some sweet sentences, and the plight of the woman who loves a man but doesn't love the idea of "belonging" to him is an important arc. Read this book as an artifact, and there's a lot to admire. As a narrative, it wears a bit thin.

[Jane]

Read for Just Read readathon, sponsored by Reema Rattan
I think this is the fourth book of this type I've read for Just Read - the vignettey, not-quite-a-novel-not-quite-a-memoir, impressionistic kinda thing: My Struggle, The Argonauts, Speedboat and now this (and in between, on the side, Luke Carman's An elegant young man...). Read in isolation, I think Novel on Yellow Paper would have delighted me, but right now I want to read a book set in an imaginary world with a gripping story line and characters that are clearly not the author. But it's not Stevie's fault.

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Underneath Stevie Smith's playful prose is a dead seriousness about the world. She just refuses to keep her feet on the ground. And I get that. It's almost insufferable, but not quite. In the meantime, there are some fabulous lines.

"But oh how sure I am that it is so much better to have love with all its pains and terrors and fanaticism than to live untouched the life of the vegetable. But how it tears one, and how unruhig it is."

[Justine · Rating 2 out of 5]

While this 'stream of consciousness' semi-autobiographical novel has its moments, for me they were few and far between. Some interesting commentary on 30s Germany, offset by some sneery comments of her own about Jews, wanderings through her unsatisfactory relationships with several men, conversations with women friends, musings on death and suicide, etc. Lots of etc.! Eccentricity abounds, but too often wearyingly.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

A hard go. It made me laugh, put me to sleep. Confused me. Made me envious of her talent and bravery. Way ahead her time? It seemed to wander and drone on at times and I always felt like I was trying to catch up with her.

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

A unique literary voice. Echoes of Virginia Woolf and the tone of an eighteenth-century romp. Excellent, entertaining, innovative. Five stars.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

elliptical and tirelessly british. moments that i loved though, won’t deny that

[Kirsty · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘But first, Reader, I will give you a word of warning. This is a foot-off-the-ground novel that came by the left hand. And the thoughts come and go and sometimes they do not quite come and I do not pursue them to embarrass them with formality to pursue them into a harsh captivity. And if you are a foot-off-the-ground person I make no bones to say that is how you will write and only how you will write. And if you are a foot-on-the-ground person, this book will be for you a desert of weariness and exasperation. So put it down. Leave it alone. It was a mistake that you made to get this book. You could not know.’

The 27th entry on the Virago Modern Classics list, which has recently been reissued, is Novel on Yellow Paper, ‘the bestselling debut novel that made Stevie Smith a star’, and which took her only ten weeks to write. Published for the first time in 1936, and the first of only three novels, Novel on Yellow Paper feels thoroughly modern in many ways. Art historian and writer Frances Spalding believes that ‘Virginia Woolf’s roving consciousness lies behind the prose… but the tone owes more to Dorothy Parker…’. Upon its publication, the book was ‘acclaimed by some critics and abhorred by others’.

The reprint features a new introduction by Rachel Cooke. She emphasises what Spalding says when she states that one literary figure of the period believed that this was the work of Woolf herself, published under the guise of a pseudonym. Originally a fan of Smith’s poetry – ‘it was her tone that really delighted me. Her irony, her wit, that slight edge of malice: these things spoke to a moody teenager. Her voice was irresistible, bending the world into a shape that was disorientatingly odd, even as it was instantly recognisable’ – Cooke was both amazed and awestruck by her prose. Of her writing, Cooke says that Smith ‘likened her fiction to the sea: on the surface bright and sunny, but seven miles down “black and cold”‘.

Our protagonist, Pompey Casmilus, is Stevie’s own alter-ego, ‘a more antic version of herself’. She is ‘young, in love and working as a secretary for the magnificent Sir Phoebus Ullwater’. Cooke writes that there is ‘a certainty about Pompey; like her creator, she has the courage of her (somewhat weird) convictions’. Between her office duties, she ‘scribbles down – on yellow office paper – her quirky thoughts’. These thoughts go off at random tangents, and ‘her flights of inspiration’ consequently cover ‘Euripedes, sex education, Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church, shattering conventions in their wake’.

Small strands of story and sharp observations wind their way through the novel – for example, ‘Yes, always someone dies, someone weeps, in tune with the laurels dripping, and the tap dripping, and the spout dripping into the water-butt, and the dim gas flickering greenly in the damp conservatory’. In this manner, one thought leads into another seemingly unconnected idea, and strange thoughts manifest and embed themselves. The sentence above, for example, is followed with this: ‘Like that flood that kid made in its cradle with that thar cunning cat sitting atop of it. And perhaps if the kid rode the flood o.k. that thar cat smothered it. For you can’t escape your fate. And I’ve known cats overlay babies. It was in the newspapers’. Smith surges from the present to the distant past and back again, placing Pompey’s present against the backdrop of the past. Due to this, at times, the plot – what little there is of it, really – can be rendered rather difficult to follow.

Smith’s prose style is incredibly interesting – that perhaps goes without saying. Her writing swirls and spirals; sometimes it is almost rhythmical, and at others it is though a barrage of thoughts, which will never cease, have been unleashed upon the reader. Novel on Yellow Paper is a reading experience and a half, and is certainly one of the most experimental titles on the Virago list which I have come across to date. It isn’t the easiest of books to get into, and Pompey is not the best of narrators for a handful of reasons. The most grating element which I found about her was the way in which she refers to herself using both the first and third person perspectives. Whilst one cannot say that she is wonderfully developed, or well rounded, she is certainly a thoroughly interesting being, however: ‘And often I think, I have a sword hanging over my head that must fall one day, because I am conscious of sin in my black heart and I think that God is saving up something that will carry Pompey away’. The entirety of the book is intense and rather erratic – quite like the impression one forms of its narrator, really.

Whilst the stream of consciousness style which has been used here is decidedly Woolfian, the same exhilaration and beauty cannot be found in Smith’s work. Novel on Yellow Paper does not read anywhere near as well as Virginia Woolf’s work does, in my opinion. Whilst it is clear that she was inspired by Woolf’s groundbreaking writing style, I do not feel that some elements here have been controlled as well as they could have been; or, indeed, explored and discussed as well as Woolf would have handled them. It is as though Smith saw the entirety of her novel merely as an experiment, rather than as an exercise to create a wondrously memorable work of fiction. Pompey herself writes that ‘this book is the talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts come, the way I said, and the people come too, and come and go, to illustrate the thoughts, to paint the moral, to adorn the tale’.

Novel on Yellow Paper is a melancholy work, breathy and almost exhausting to read in places. It is not a novel to be taken lightly; the whole is memorable and quite powerful in places. The novel’s sequel, Over the Frontier, has also been reissued by Virago, and is sure to be of interest to all of those who are drawn into Smith’s experimental style.

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I first started this I thought it felt like British Clarice Lispector— all rambling, stream-of-consciousness interior monologue about this secretary’s life and opinions and beliefs, written in these beautiful never-ending sentences by a writer more famous for her poetry. As I went on though I started to glean less and less from it until I realized I was eventually just staring at word salad that I couldn’t understand at all. Gorgeously written word salad! But by page 90 I had no idea what she was saying, and the fact that she rarely finishes thoughts made it that much harder (she’ll go off on a tangent or anecdote then interrupt it partway in with a new tangent which gets interrupted by another…) I can appreciate the dexterity of the writing but as a book I didn’t really get much out of it! Wish I could.

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found this pretty impenetrable when I was just dipping into it for 15 mins at a time, and only got something out of it when I sat down with it for a few hours. I like the way Stevie Smith conjures up the political climate in the background of her narrator’s frenzied internal monologue (her anti-Semitic remarks early on followed by the chilling realisation that something awful is brewing in Germany is especially clever). Clear similarities with Orwell in the way she satirises the British middle class / liberal elite (and they were rumoured to be lovers apparently!). Very witty and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny turns of phrase. But also I felt like I was experiencing this in snatches: there would be a couple of paragraphs at a time when I followed and then I’d be plunged into something fairly nonsensical again. I probably needed more of an academic hat on to engage it with properly, but also left me feeling that it could have done with a fairly heavy-handed edit !

[Monica · Rating 2 out of 5]

Experimental, frequently frustrating and exasperating with too many quotations from the classics and literary digressions but enough emotional and some contemporary social and political commentary and musings to keep "a foot on the ground type of person" from escaping from this stream of consciousness female novelist's musings on her own section of life in the England of 1936 with some escapades to Germany. A 2.5 stars.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Idiosyncratic (was Beckett a fan?), jagged, funny, pointed—but also so formless that it feels much longer than it is, so that I give it three instead of four stars.

[Basil Bowdler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really lively and engaging narrative voice! Seesaws a bit jarringly, but dramatically, from anchor heavy depression to cloud fluffy joy, nice!