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A review by lenakart
Summer in the City of Roses by Michelle Ruiz Keil
4.0
I loved this book, but it's not for everyone. This book was, honestly, my exact brand of weird, and I think it was what I needed at a particular moment in time. It is strange and it is beautiful and disconnected and flowing. It is old and modern all at once. It's set in the 90s, but it honestly took me a while to realize that. There's an absence of cell phones, but I feel like that's relatively well accounted for by the story in most places, so it has a kind of odd anachronistic feeling - like it could be happening now, or really, at any point in the last 30 years or so.
Admittedly, I took a break from reading it once things got weird, but I came back to it and I'm glad I did. As other reviews have said, there is a break, late in the novel, where it just gets... weird. The book initially reads like magical realism. It feels like it takes place in real life, and while there are magical details, everything is still mostly plausible. Probably around 3/4 of the way in, that changes to become just... completely dreamy and surreal. Completely implausible, in a literal sense. Beautiful and strange and somehow oddly right. I think I enjoyed the book so much for a couple of reasons:
1. I choose to believe that everything that happened in it was literal. I want to believe in the magical transformations and the found objects in the perfect spot at the perfect time, and in newfound fairy tales coming to life. I want to believe that's possible, in the world of fiction, if not in the world of real life.
2. It was a close echo of some relationships I've had in my life. I had a brother that I loved very much, and, while I didn't lose him in the same way that Iph lost Orr, the image of Orr drifting away into the forest, of finding somewhere he truly belongs, among creatures who understand him - somewhere that he's happy and at peace... Well, that brings me a bit of comfort, and maybe a little bit of hope. And I think I needed it.
This is an odd, dreamy, ambiguous, lyrical book, and so, it probably deserves an odd, dreamy, nonsensical review. And so, here's the review that I wrote when I was halfway through, before the strange surrealism kicked in:
The plot is feathers strung together with gossamer thread. At once disconnected, and yet, all of a piece. You gather them, one by one, until you hold a strange kind of feathered bouquet between your palms. Just as suddenly, the bouquet becomes a bird and takes flight, and you’re left wondering what it is you’ve just seen, and if it was even real.
******
In short... this book isn't everyone's cup of tea. I think I'm the kind of person who's capable of discerning between something that's genuinely "bad" (poorly written or plotted or what-have-you) versus something that's just "not for me" - I think this book exists on the opposite end of that spectrum. I think it is both objectively good - beautiful and dreamy in ways that I can't accurately describe - and almost exactly for me. I hope, if you try it, that you enjoy it.
Admittedly, I took a break from reading it once things got weird, but I came back to it and I'm glad I did. As other reviews have said, there is a break, late in the novel, where it just gets... weird. The book initially reads like magical realism. It feels like it takes place in real life, and while there are magical details, everything is still mostly plausible. Probably around 3/4 of the way in, that changes to become just... completely dreamy and surreal. Completely implausible, in a literal sense. Beautiful and strange and somehow oddly right. I think I enjoyed the book so much for a couple of reasons:
1. I choose to believe that everything that happened in it was literal. I want to believe in the magical transformations and the found objects in the perfect spot at the perfect time, and in newfound fairy tales coming to life. I want to believe that's possible, in the world of fiction, if not in the world of real life.
2. It was a close echo of some relationships I've had in my life. I had a brother that I loved very much, and, while I didn't lose him in the same way that Iph lost Orr, the image of Orr drifting away into the forest, of finding somewhere he truly belongs, among creatures who understand him - somewhere that he's happy and at peace... Well, that brings me a bit of comfort, and maybe a little bit of hope. And I think I needed it.
This is an odd, dreamy, ambiguous, lyrical book, and so, it probably deserves an odd, dreamy, nonsensical review. And so, here's the review that I wrote when I was halfway through, before the strange surrealism kicked in:
The plot is feathers strung together with gossamer thread. At once disconnected, and yet, all of a piece. You gather them, one by one, until you hold a strange kind of feathered bouquet between your palms. Just as suddenly, the bouquet becomes a bird and takes flight, and you’re left wondering what it is you’ve just seen, and if it was even real.
******
In short... this book isn't everyone's cup of tea. I think I'm the kind of person who's capable of discerning between something that's genuinely "bad" (poorly written or plotted or what-have-you) versus something that's just "not for me" - I think this book exists on the opposite end of that spectrum. I think it is both objectively good - beautiful and dreamy in ways that I can't accurately describe - and almost exactly for me. I hope, if you try it, that you enjoy it.