Our Endless Numbered Days

I don't like unreliable narrators. I didn't realize, at first, that Peggy was one. Even though she mentions at the start of the book that a doctor said she had Korsakoff's syndrome - meaning malnutrition has messed with her memories - I assumed that it was just because her experiences were so unbelievable that the doctor thought she'd made things up. I also don't like unreliable narrators because the author obviously knows what truly happened. Leaving the reader in the dark about it seems rude.

Peggy's narration does seem childlike, often. While at the beginning of the book, that can be excused because she is eight years old, by the end she is seventeen, yet still talking about things with a child's understanding. I thought that was the effect of Korsakoff's syndrome, not that she was entirely making some things up.

In our endless numbered days, Peggy is effectively kidnapped by her father when she is eight, and taken to some place deep in the German forest. She spends the next nine years alone in the forest with him, trapping squirrels, gathering roots and berries, and growing simple crops in a small vegetable patch. He tells her, repeatedly, making her repeat it back to him, that the rest of the world was destroyed in a massive storm. They are the last two people alive in their small, sheltered valley. She doesn't question it until she sees a man in their forest, and that eventually leads her to find civilization again. The book is told in two timelines, flashing back and forth from her memories of her time in the forest, and the present where she's attempting to re-acclimate to London.

I'm not really sure what to believe; Peggy's memory or what her mother thinks happened. There are just enough oddities to make either story plausible. I think I prefer Peggy's version. But that's the trouble with unreliable narrators; there's no way to actually know. I don't like ending a book frustrated. Books should make you feel things, yes, but frustration is an odd emotion to aim for.

This book is odd.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

While I can appreciate the writing, and the storytelling craft of the author, I really did not love this book. I think part of my dislike is due to the fact that I saw the movie ‘Room' about 3 days before starting this book, and with both stories about prolonged kidnap and abuse it was a bit too much. So for that, the author gets my kudos. I definitely ‘felt' something when reading this book. The story does speak to the strength of the human spirit and will to survive, and what our minds will do to protect us from horrible truths.

“Dates only make us aware of how numbered our days are, how much closer to death we are for each one we cross off.”

This book almost put me in a reading slump. Took me awhile to read through because I was easily distracted with other things. I was bored throughout the book, it just couldn't keep my attention.

The last 50 pages though!!! I was originally gonna give it 1.5 stars but the ending!! Didn't see that coming. So I bumped it up to 2.5.

The premise was good but I think it just wasn't executed properly. The book is about a young girl who was taken by her father to live in a forest, he pretended that the world ended so he could keep here in the hut. Sounds like an interesting read right? I wished the book was written in a way that is easy to read but suspenseful at the same time.

It wasn't a bad book, I just didn't enjoy reading it. I wanted to DNF at first but decided to finish it ‘coz it's not a long book after all, it just dragged.

Kinda wish I could unread this. It was compelling enough at first, if repetitive, but I kept hoping it would reveal more about the father's motivations than the very thin, unsatisfying reason revealed in the last few pages. And even though I suspected where the plot “twist” was going, I'm still very disgusted the author decided to include not only incestuous rape but a pregnancy resulting from that, especially the rushed way in which it was done at the very end. I understand what trauma does to your psyche can be a compelling topic to explore, but the author doesn't really do that here–it just ends up feeling sordid.

I don't think I've ever read a book that was so close to losing me and managed to suck me back in before I put it down. And not just manage to pull me back but to make me re-frame all the things that were bothering me. Ultimately, I loved this book, but I do feel a little bit short-changed by it at the same time.

First; things I loved about the book. I loved the writing. Fuller does an excellent job of making a really believable and interesting child character in the first person without resorting to emulating child speak. Personally, I often have a hard time with child narrators in adult fiction eg. I began reading Room, and while I could tell that it was done extremely well and I could see why people were raving about that book, it just took me out of the story. But, here, Fuller has managed to put some objective distance between the actual events and Peggy's recounting of them that allows for a really wonderful unfolding of the story that are full of very shrewd child-like observations and imaginings without sacrificing the lyricism of the prose.

There is a direct quality to Peggy's narration of first-hand events in the first portion of the book that I really loved, and during the portion of the book set in the forest while she's a teenager, some first-hand events are now described in vague and ambiguous terms. I generally enjoy being asked, as a reader, to read between the lines, or parse allusions, but this seemed so at odds to the storytelling in the rest of the book that I found it jarring and frustrating. “Is she saying that x-y-and-z just happened, or isn't she?” But then the denouement of the book was such a feat, and miraculously caused me to look at all the things before it that had frustrated me in a series of “a-ha” moments. The ending is not unpredictable per se, I was not particularly surprised by any of the twists, but the way it unfolds and changes certain moments and illuminates them in a different way was so impressive. It struck me as a risk that nearly didn't pay off, as I did come quite close to putting the book down.

Once those frustrations were stopped in their tracks, rolled back, and reworked much to my delight, the only real criticism I was left with was pacing. We get the beginning and the end of Peggy and her father's nine years in the woods, and nothing in between, and we also get moments of life after she's returned to London (not a spoiler, the first page starts here). Frankly, I wanted much more. It's not that the jump from eight to seventeen isn't done well from a technical perspective, I just wanted to spend more time there. I wanted the psychological environment of those last few months or year to have had more time to develop and be explored. And the time we spend with Peggy in London readjusting to life was so, so good that the fact that there isn't more of it seems like a missed opportunity.

It's a beautiful book and Fuller is an excellent writer - I'll definitely keep an eye out for other books from her - and ultimately I was left very satisfied but just wanting more.

Fourteen-year-old me would have LOVED this novel. Jaded, old me, was not really impressed. On top of that, I have this daydream I escape to when my day gets stressful of running away and living by myself in a cabin in the middle of nowhere (I would stock up on books and junk food). This novel kind of ruined that for me, at least for awhile. I lost patience with this about 80 pages in. We were getting so much description in one paragraph about a musicless piano and no description about what happened during the hours of the day. The book picked back up when Punzel met Reuben, but the red flags that the climax was coming was were so loud, I was like “alright, already” when it got there.
I did love the cover, the expression on the kid's face is priceless.