Arcadia

It took me a couple tries to get into it but so glad I did. A beautiful story about what makes us human - love, loss, community, etc. Bit is a fantastic character, and Groff has a beautiful writing style.

Because I don't love stories narrated by children, I had some difficulty with the first half of this book, set in the Arcadia commune. But when time passes and the narrator, Bit, has grown up, it really soared for me. The last section of the book was a bit of a leap, but I went with it and it really worked.

Lauren Groff has incredible intuition. She knows how to get at the ambivalence that underlies every decision we make, the ways we can doubt every emotion we feel. At its core, Arcadia is about a relationship between a son and his mother, but it let me down when the son falls in love with another. We miss the true impact of the life-changing decisions he makes, especially in light of his relationships with his mother and other women. Still, I look forward to reading more of what Groff has written.

Wonderful. Evocative and spellbinding. I loved this world and characters. Groff's sentences are poetry.