WardenRed reviewed You Must Not Miss by Katrina Leno
None
3 stars
Everybody has a reason to want to change their lives.
I've read two books by Katrina Leno before (Summer of Salt and Everything All at Once), and I thought they were beautiful. They both dealt with really tough subjects and made me tear up more than once, but they were also very life-affirming somehow. So when a friend lent me You Must Not Miss saying she thought I might like it, I expected to like it indeed, and I expected it to make me feel roughly the same way as the author's other books did.
I... was wrong, I guess.
I did like a lot about this book. I liked the characterization. I loved Leno's prose. I liked big parts of how the story was constructed, gradually revealing the truth about what had happened in Magpie's life. I didn't exactly like (because this isn't the sort of thing …
Everybody has a reason to want to change their lives.
I've read two books by Katrina Leno before (Summer of Salt and Everything All at Once), and I thought they were beautiful. They both dealt with really tough subjects and made me tear up more than once, but they were also very life-affirming somehow. So when a friend lent me You Must Not Miss saying she thought I might like it, I expected to like it indeed, and I expected it to make me feel roughly the same way as the author's other books did.
I... was wrong, I guess.
I did like a lot about this book. I liked the characterization. I loved Leno's prose. I liked big parts of how the story was constructed, gradually revealing the truth about what had happened in Magpie's life. I didn't exactly like (because this isn't the sort of thing I can apply the word "like" to) but I was genuinely impressed by the visceral honesty of depicting the impact abuse and neglect have on people. I really felt for Magpie. I wanted some sort of victory for her. I wanted a chance for her to get better.
Instead, it felt like I only got to witness her defeat.
<spoiler>Yes, she got her vengeance and she escaped to her perfect world that she could completely control and therefore could trust. I kind of very much get why she made this choice, why it was better than taking the risk of trying to heal in this imperfect world of hours, to rely on Ben and Clare, to try and build a future, a life, a self that will always carry the scars but can be made whole again, in a different way. I get it, and it makes me sad and angry. It makes the book read like a suicide note.</spoiler>
I also wasn't a fan of how the whole Near plotline was handled on the whole. In magical realism books like this, I expect to see a sort of ambiguity: "Is this real, or is this only happening in the character's head?" Here, this ambiguity was handled in a pretty weird way for me. On one hand, I felt like I was expected to immediately buy it that Near is completely, 100% real. On the other hand, for at least the first 2/3 of the book there was preciously little reason to actually think so, if I looked closely at the actual events. I don't know, it was like I expected a soft shadow play and got stark contrasts, and it only served to magnify that feeling I talked about in the paragraph under the spoiler above.
Bottom line: I felt like this ended up being a story about the abusers winning, despite the successful revenge and the supposed empowerment the MC got, and I didn't like that.
