A lot of the reviews printed out on the cover of this book suggest that the novel is funny. I really don’t agree. Like… at all. Sarcastic? Sure. But this book is the kind of joke you tell at your own expense. The kind of joke you say while you swallow down a sob. It’s a hard fucking read. 

Ultimately, this book is about the body and the inherent and personal traumas that it can hold. It’s about having inherent trauma from living inside a racialized body. It’s about knowing that fact but still trying to commodify it by condensing down your lived experiences into books, into art, palatable enough for wider (read: whiter) audiences. It’s about performing your own reality for profit all while living in constant fear of accidentally revealing something that’s too real, real enough to scare away your voyeurs. This book is also about personal trauma. It’s about having a body that remembers but a mind that doesn’t. It’s about finding a perverted form of freedom in that divide all while knowing that the gap between the two will eventually stop existing; humans are both the mind and the body… they can’t stay separated for long… eventually one with catch up with the other… or slow down to the other’s pace. 

I really enjoyed the commentary this book had on navigating literary and academic spaces as a minority/person of colour. The main reason why I didn’t give this book a 5/5 rating is because I think the pacing is a little odd in places (would’ve loved if the book was longer, actually). 

Still, it was a good read. At first, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the fantastical, absurdist tone of the ending but I’ve come to appreciate it after sitting on it for a minute. Having the tone shift when revealing something as traumatic and intense as what Mona went through actually works in highlighting the very real event. The absurdity of the fantastical brushes right up against the absurdity of reality.