The Small Backs of Children

Normally I don't write reviews of books I didn't love, but this one is so very popular, I feel like it can take my lowly critiques with barely a glance...I love that Yuknavitch swung for the bleachers with this, playing with the format, making some of the prose almost purposefully heavy-handed, jumping around in the narration, but in the end it mostly didn't work for me.

Some of the language is wonderful, and that alone is worth the read–but some of it struck me as almost hard-boiled-stylized, which didn't work (for me) because of some of the deep themes being explored (“she felt as empty as bullet shell casings”? really?). I wanted more exploration of those themes without the stylized language.

There's a lot of sexual violence in this book, most of it relatively pointless, though I'm confident that was purposefully done–the consequences of it felt like an afterthought though, and that wasn't as interesting a read for me. Yep, lots of horrible sexual violence is done (mostly) to women by (mostly) men in the world, and there's probably value in not looking away from that. But here it's a plot point, and not explored in any meaningful way. (Again, that may have been her point, as meaningless sexual violence is a fact of life.)

I also didn't feel the different narrators had different voices. Maybe this was also on purpose (a character says early on, “I don't trust narrators”), but it didn't work for me.

One person's “deconstruction” is another person's “just jumbled together” I suppose.