Ebook provided by BookSirens for review. Thank you.
Read April 2022.
4/5 stars
This was a strange and engaging little book. We follow a nameless narrator and his connections? I'm not sure how to word it. We open with our narrator and his friend Jules just hanging out, she then invites Dennis who is struggling with something. We later learn that Dennis has taken his own life.
What follows is our narrator pondering over his various friendships, peppered with letters some have written themselves. In fact the only person who doesn't write a letter is Estelle. Once upon a time he bullied them - sidenote but I loved how self-aware he was about his past mistakes - but a chance meeting leads to an almost something, the overarching theme to this section is his pride in Estelle discovering their identity, and getting rid of an apparently racist boyfriend.
Our other characters are Gabriel, openly gay and angry at the world, and Joshua, Jules's younger brother who had a connection to Dennis and feels partially responsible. A small cast yet effective in its simplicity.
At 178 pages by GoodReads description this is a short book and I think that would be my main criticism. It is great as it is but I wanted more. More backstory, more connections. I wasn't a fan of the way things were abandoned with Gabriel and I hated how abrupt the ending was. Did our narrator sort his crap out? Who was he?
Stef Out x
