Reviews and Comments

Handler's description of his harrowing experiences with mental health—and that's putting it mildly—in the third chapter ("Are You OK?") is an extraordinarily frank, vivid, and vulnerable piece of writing.

McAlpine’s use of the collective ”we” narrator is both effective and unsettling. To me, it somewhat recalls the epic oral history-telling of Doris Lessing’s The Making of the Representative for Planet 8.

Part I read like an impressionistic representation of small-town small-mindedness interrupted by short chapters revealing the characters of Dorothy and her interlocutor. But here at the start of Part II, McAlpine, famously a writer of twisted mysteries, seems to be turning After Oz into a whodunnit with his “lady doctor” psychologist as the detective.

Profoundly uncomfortable first chapter.

Hard to say no to this dust jacket promo copy: “What makes readers fall in love? You might want to start your answer by explaining #UrsulaLeGuin. She owned John Plotz at age eight, on the overlit and understaffed second floor of the DC library. Four decades and who knows how many re-readings later, her #Earthsea owns him still.”

Welp, Chapter 5 escalated quickly. 😬

Bottle Grove’s almost-but-not-quite #SanFrancisco reinforces the unreliability and hallucinatory nature of the narrative.

Bottle Grove felt slight at the start, but grew on me as I read it. About two-thirds through, I started to see it as deceptively sophisticated… it had a hallucinatory quality that kept making me go back to earlier parts of the novel to try to reorient/recontextualize what I was reading.

One chapter in. Martin Hench has clear #GeorgeSmiley vibes, which is a plus in my book. I keep imagining Danny Lazer as #JohnMcAfee … though I hope Lazer ends up less depraved than that. Love the name “Unsalted Hash” for Hench’s land yacht.

Rereading, this time aloud with Gemma.