I am an artist, and lately I have had this feeling, a reluctance to get excited about my work, a fear of being consumed by it, a kind of terror at the idea that I might lose myself in the worlds I want to create. And I think, aside from all the beautiful things this book has to say about sisterhood and love and loss and belonging, it also has a lot to say about creativity. About that fear of stepping outside of the acceptable, and building something new and beautiful even if it might mean madness or being different than everyone around you. I think it will take me a while to untangle all of the different things this book had to say. I think I will be thinking about it for a long long time.

This is an incredibly ambitious book. A deeply beautiful look at sisterhood, stories, community, and longing, with a winding and overlapping narrative that slowly spills out over it's 450 pages. The craft itself has me in awe of Mehta as a writer and a thinker. Super gorgeous writing and message.

Unfortunately for me, though, it kind of broke down in the middle. I was/am really invested in our opening characters, and just as I was truly falling in love with them and aching with and for them we shift focus, and I felt like we languished there for entirely too long before landing the proverbial plane. This might be an unkind criticism, as I don't have a ready list of what parts I think we could have done without. But I do know that there were several times I realized I was ready to be done, but then also realized I still had 100+ pages to go. Perhaps if there had been more blending to keep both strings at the forefront together? We also spend a good portion of the book being told instead of shown; quite literally most of this book is a (beautiful) summary of events, as opposed to sharing in the journey itself. It makes sense with the structure of the novel, but I was pretty consistently pulled out of the narrative due to the changing framing and perspective that reminds you you're being told a story instead of getting to experience the story. A contrast to this would When The Tiger Came Down The Mountain by Nghi Vo - both tell a story within a story, but When The Tiger is able to keep you in the story while it's being told, and effectively pulls you out of the inner story back into the primary story in a way that I didn't feel here. None of this should deter you from reading; I do think this is a remarkable work and I will absolutely be checking out what else Mehta has written.

The entire world is so lovely. It's fun and enticing, captivating and makes you long to be within it, while also posing danger and risk that you can't help but think would be worth it. Mehta's ability to introduce you to something that you immediately fall in love with is really impressive. As a result, I suspect I'll be thinking about this book for a long time.