The poetic prose in this was very pretty and the subject - the idea of familial history coloring your own present, the inescapable roots of self. I think, for me, a lot of meaning was lost in the back and forth of the timelines, too much of my brainpower was spent trying to place myself in the the correct time, the frame of mind I needed to be in to absorb the prose of what was happening, so I feel like I missed a lot of deeper meanings. With the audiobook I sort've feel like this was expounded because it's harder to mull over the poetic nature of it when it's being read to you, when it is, essentially, a novel length poem, and I gave up going back to relisten to segments once I realized the entire book would be the same way.