TW: mentioned rape, pregnancy complications/birth defect, death of infant
2.5

This book is.... hardly a book. It's hard to talk about, because it sort of feels like trying to retell someone else's stream of consciousness. Basically- social media, right?

What I liked about this book was the writing, the style sometimes was a bit much for me, but it worked more often than it didn't. And it does feel very true to the time that we've been through, and are currently going through. And when the emotion comes through to lance the story, it does so very vivdly.

However, a lot of this just did not feel like art or a story to me. This book feels like being trapped in someone's brain during quarantine, which makes sense and does ring true, but, well... I was already trapped in my own brain during quarantine, not to mention very online the entire time and so brushing by other people's quarantine brains constantly. Therefore, this book doesn't really do anything for or to me. It doesn't feel so much like a reflection or a message on any of this than it does regurgitation.
As for being a story or not, there is a plot here, and sometimes it's interesting, but it also take such a long time to get to anything that looks even slightly like plot that it barely made a dent on the over all reading experience. And that also meant that the emotional pay off didn't feel like it had any real meaning tied to it, or weight.

I know people like this for the experimental quality, and for showing life online so well- but it's just too on the nose for me to be anything but someone basically blogging at me on a printed page. I've seen more compelling, nuanced, funny posts about these same topics on the actual internet, and I think this is a very middling way of approaching them.