a lot of it is violence and manipulation and confusion. it takes place in the underpinnings - the secret dirty linens of family history and the mysteries of teen-girl psychology. This isn't the david lynch exploration of the horrors of suburbia - it is more subtle even than that. i liked how shadowy the tone of the rest of the book was - it felt dangerous and subterranean and the end felt flashlit and exposed, if that makes any sense to anyone who hasn't read it. The only thing preventing this book from a five-star rating was the ending. it's a really excellent way to tell a story in moments. I loved that all of the action took place during two subsequent summers - it is like coming across a jumble of someone else's photographs in a box and there are so many questions about what happened in between the time when the pictures were taken. this book is a collection of things that happened to two sister characters during their formative years with a father suffering from PTSD, a war-memento metal plate in his head and a penchant for wearing a gorilla mask and hands, a dancer-mother who no longer dances, and is wilting under pressure, and a series of sexually curious and pre-predatory boys metaphorically peering over the fence. there is no individual arc to each story, but neither does it create, at the end of the day, a cohesive novel. This book resides in the porous space between short stories and novel. This is a family story, focused upon the dangerous and subtle undertow of the first awareness of sex and death and their commingling in preadolescent girls. and it manifests itself in a thousand ways in the details of this book - the foundations are disturbed.
I am choosing to picture the sisters in this book as looking like sally mann's photographs.
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