This book validated something wordless and deep within me that I genuinely cannot begin to explain. It was odd and contained nothing that I could have ever expected before reading, and yet I found myself deeply invested despite being told the end right at the beginning and sobbed multiple times throughout.

I think the story, and most particularly the ending, so beautifully encapsulated the feeling I get when I think too hard about being a little nematode of a living being floating on a rock in a vast, ever expanding universe that will never reveal any of its secrets in my lifetime. I'm here by sheer luck, I'm conscious and cognitive by the same stroke of fate and at the end of the day the only meaning to my existence is the value I ascribe to it. And that feeling sucks if you let it, but it's also so incredibly freeing.