Ali Smith is one of the most incredible writers I have ever come across. Her ability to play with form, while never making it feel superficial, is amazing to me. 

For this particular copy, whoever at the Observer called this book "sexy" and whoever at the publishing office decided to put that on the cover? You two? You call me. Let's talk about those choices. Y'all are wild. 

My favourite quotes included:

Ducks actually have their own road sign! There is a sofa warehouse called Sofa So Good. It is dismal. There is a church. The church has its own roadsign too. Nothing happens here except a church and some ducks, and this house is an ultimate dump. It is substandard. Nothing is going to happen all substandard summer. 

Any minute now she would step back through the door into the room. 

There she was now, in the doorway. 

Oh 

It keeps getting dark when it's light, he says. I mean, when it's not meant to be dark. 

Does it? Amber says.

She thinks about it.

Persistence of vision, she says. You must have  seen something so dark that it's carried on affecting your vision even though you're not looking directly at it anymore.

But how? Magnus asks. 

Exactly the same as if you saw something too bright, she says. 

The dead weren't the problem. The dead could look after themselves. Eve was beginning to grieve for the living. 

i really don’t know what to make of this book. the reason i’m rating it so highly is bc of the prose, it was absolutely STUNNING writing, so much that i can’t really believe every single paragraph had me underlining and annotating something due to my awe, but the actual “plot” was so boring. there wasn’t really a plot, nor anything happening of great importance, and when something did happen (right at the end), it came with no explanation nor consequence. i loved the astrid and magnus chapters, i think because they were younger there was more meat to their narration and thought process VS. michael’s perverse power imbalance of having sex with students and eve’s just uninteresting life and writing which she hates. magnus was so hit-or-miss for me as a character, but my sympathy for him knows no bounds. amber can go and fall into a ditch, i don’t understand her character at all. not sure if i’m supposed to or i’m just being thick. i wish we delved more into why astrid was taken out of school for two months, about the bullying, but i guess we can’t have everything. if you enjoy beautiful writing and don’t care abt plot/characters, this book is for you! for sure! just be aware of the content warnings because my goodness… 

There are so many sections of this book that I loved but overall I couldn't quite get past all the other content to rate it any higher. Excited to read more of Ali Smith, think their writing will always work best for me when in audiobook form