Oh my. There is a lot packed into this little book. I mean a lot. Two books, three books, worth of interactions and plots and conversations and reasons and fiction-thingies that make books books and not real life. We have a brother with anger issues. We have immigrant parents. We have random violence unrelated to the brother with anger issues. We have high school friends staying friends forever (which I guess happens. I still talk to, at best we’ll say 0.75 of a person of my high school friends, but I suppose there are other people who stay close to those they knew as teenagers. Me: I prefer to remove all reminders of adolescence, including, but not limited to, people, places, and things). We have weddings. We have break-ups. We have stalker-ish, suicidal sisters with power-of-attorney forms. We have a suitcase of a book with the zipper popping open and staying closed only with the help of a huge roll of duct tape.
Maybe all of everything in Be Ready for the Lightning happened somewhere to someone, because it has that feeling of truth being stranger/more fantastical than fiction. At a micro-level, each of the bits works, but Be Ready for the Lightning often feels like too much of a good thing. A black hole collapsing in on itself. I feel weighed down after reading.
Be Ready for the Lightning by Grace O’Connell went on sale June 6, 2017.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.