Danielewski's weird experimental novels — structurally weird, narratively weird, typographically weird -- always seem get one star or five stars from readers, with nothing in between. I fall in the five stars camp. I eat this stuff up.

This is is the first volume of a story that will supposedly run to 27 volumes. It’s 800 pages. The story, such that is is, is of a young epileptic girl who on a single rainy day in May finds a mysterious kitten. It’s set in multiple typefaces and colors and languages and is told from nine different points of view. Some of those points of view are plotless and meandering, some are in multilingual patois, some are full of inter-sentence digressions that go down multiple levels and then come up again. I have heard that the Kindle version preserves all the typographical and structural ticks of the story, but honestly, although I love my Kindle I think this book works better on paper.

It is an art object and a difficult book, but it’s also compulsively readable — much closer to MZD's wonderful House of Leaves than the painfully difficult Only Revolutions. In some ways it reminds me of David Mitchell’s the Bone Clocks. The Bone Clocks had similar interleaving narratives, different points of view, and the suggestion of alternative time- and space-spanning universes. The Familiar is like the Bone Clocks turned up to 11 and with a slant toward the surreal.

The characters are for the most part very richly drawn — especially Xanther and her parents — but I had trouble following the plot lines of the minor characters. I sometimes had to go back and reread sections to remember what was going on when a new section started and who these people were. (fortunately, all the characters are color coded, so it was easy to skip back and forth.) Some of the minor character sections feel very thin, and there was one section in the middle that goes completely meta in a “whaaaaa” kind of way. But overall: I liked the story, I was challenged and intrigued by the structure, and I’m on board for the other 26 volumes.