Long-listed for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in FictionA New York Times Book Review Editors’ ChoiceA magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised—the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now Agnès is free to tell her story. As children in a war-ravaged backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves—until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.
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0Yet, in retrospect, with the present to vindicate the past, everyone can claim the illusory status of being a seer."
The star points of this book were the establishing first <100 pages, centered upon Agnes and Fabienne, and the toxic friendship they had, and the stories that they told themselves to escape their current horrid condition. When the book deviated from that, splitting the two characters and sending them on different paths, it quickly lost it's over-arching theme, and any intrigue I had began to slowly dissipate. After establishing these two characters as inter-connected girls, I simply did not care enough about Agnes and her separate journey. To me, Yiyun Li, established two separate stories within this book, one about two girls growing up in rural France, and another about a gifted student attending a preparatory school in England. Both of these could have been well-established novels within their own rights, but the moulding together of the two didn't work, and the closing chapters were lackluster, the 'mystery' seemingly never solved, leaving with the overarching feeling that Yiyun Li had a deadline yet no ideas on the ending.
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