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From debut author Cole Nagamatsu comes an atmospheric contemporary fantasy about three teens coming of age in the wake of a mysterious death.Last summer, Link Miller drowned on dry land in the woods, miles away from the nearest body of water. His death was ruled a strange accident, and in the months since, his friends and family have struggled to make sense of it. But Link's close friend Noemi Amato knows the truth: Link drowned in an impossible lake that only she can find. And what's more, someone claiming to be Link has been contacting her, warning Noemi to stay out of the forest.As these secrets become too heavy for Noemi to shoulder on her own, she turns to Jonas, her new housemate, and Amberlyn, Link's younger sister. All three are trying to find their place—and together, they start to unravel the truth: about themselves, about the world, and about what happened to Link.Unfolding over a year and told through multiple POVs and a dream journal, We Were Restless Things explores the ways society shapes our reality, how we can learn to love ourselves and others, and the incredible power of our own desires.
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We Were Restless Things, a lyrical debut from Cole Nagamatsu, relates the aftermath of a small town death. Teenaged Link Miller is found dead in the woods, having seemingly drowned on dry land, miles away from any body of water. He leaves behind him an assortment of other teenagers - a sister, a friend, a friend he'd rather was a girlfriend - who, along with the new boy in town, explore the woods and themselves, as their lives swirl and eddy around the impossible loss, trying to make sense of the unearthly and of one another.
Nagamatsu's novel is a haunting, languorously eerie story that drifts back and forth across the border between reality and fantasy; a mystery that ebbs and flows through dreamlike tide pools of unknowing. We're given a cast of characters who feel as flesh and blood as one could hope for in a book, scared and strong and confused teenagers caught in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood. The whole story explores these liminal spaces - magic and mundanity, the wondrous and the horrible, dream and wakefulness, love and hatred, death and life. The boy who drowns on dry land; the girl who photographs her dreams. The surface of the water, ringed with ripples, the only sign that something has submerged, passed from one element into another. The edge of the forest, and the crossing from home into danger, into a fairy tale. The narrow but unbridgeable, unfathomable, gap between two human hearts.
Being languorous and dreamlike doesn’t mean the story lacks for urgency; after all, dreams can sometimes have the strongest sense of immediacy and desperation despite being about nothing. And We Were Restless Things isn’t even that. Things happen, the plot moves along, revelations are unfolded, even if not always in a linear fashion or at a galloping pace, but with an inexorable weirdness that kept me hooked. It's a nautilus shell of a story, labyrinthine and echoing with ocean sounds that aren't there, and I loved every page.
Would recommend to fans of The Lost Coast, The Things She’s Seen, and Erin Morgenstern.
CW: child abuse, parental neglect, catfishing, self harm, drowning, death, sibling death, mention of suicide
Thank you to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Fire for the advance review copy!
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