It was in its repetition that the ‘telling’ revealed itself to me. It sparked a curiosity and fuelled an admiration of its effect as the pages were turned. However, it was in the eventual ‘slip’ into the rhythm of the chapters, the themes radiant in their intent, and its emotion prime in their impact, that its technicality began to submerge into the background, and there amongst the foreground of the reading experience was me and my vulnerabilities. At a critical point of the story, my eyes welled in tears, and the boy, once a third-degree character enduring it, has become an intimate attachment to myself; it was during then that the unspoken tether between the protagonist and reader came into full effect, a collective experience that is shared and empathised, bursting through the end of it as impacted and revelatory as the character has endured. Depths of metaphor and familiar attributes of living coney themselves in ways that have silently imprisoned humanity, and the honest fear of such a cycle repeating itself into the lives of our offspring make such all the more harrowing, not to mention suffering through it personally. How to Hold a Cockroach guides us to life’s now obscured senses, hoping to rip off the veil that we have unknowingly donned ourselves, and experience this precious life for all its worth.