This book was not what I expected.

Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose is a story about the friendship between the narrator Agnes and her childhood friend Fabienne. The story is framed as the recollection of the narrator now in America, fourteen years since the events of the book in a French village, when Agnes and Fabienne wrote a book together that propels Agnes into literary stardom, and ultimately changes the relationship between the girls irreparably.

While everything in the above paragraph is true (and more or less how other reviews will summarize the plot of the book in a spoiler-free way), the book subverted my expectations of what a book would look like that would tell this kind of story. Perhaps what is more true, then, would be to describe the book as not a plot-forward book, but a character-forward book. The driving force of the book is not the things that happen to Agnes and Fabienne, but how the relationship between Agnes and Fabienne unfolds as things happen to them. The book reflects on the special nature of childhood friendships - the way they simply and fatefully occur, rather than are orchestrated by adults or shared interests - while at once drawing the simple and fateful nature of it in question. There are hints of not only friendship but romantic entanglement between the two, and as the book takes place on the cusp of puberty and their growth from children into adulthood, the two must decide what will become of their shared bond.

I read this as part of a book club, and one of the other members described this book as feeling “experimental” - a characterization I’d agree with. Pair with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels for a more conventional (in both plot and themes) take on female childhood friendship.