Negative Space

I read the last couple of hundred pages in the company of dear people. I could have stopped reading and resumed by cozy social evening, but I could not bare to not know how this book ends. What happens all the way to the point where the author decided that enough has happened.

This was an extremely good read. For me, what stood out most was the depth of emotion, turmoil, the nuanced decisions of each character. There was no point where one of them felt "secondary". Some stories contain characters who feel like they are meant to provide context for "the main characters" to develop. This book did nothing of the sort.

I felt waves of powerful, consuming emotions, while reading this. I've had nightmares and vivid dreams every night while I was reading it and I fully expect that fragments will populate my subconscious and bubble to the surface for a long time to come.

There are frequent descriptions, in the book, of moments when one character is within the body of another. I often felt I was inhabiting the fictional body of these people who didn't exist, but who were vivid and vibrant in my mind. Maybe those parts of the book described empathy, projected desire, or allowed one character to interact with another in a way that wasn't possible in the physical world.

Gender and sexuality, in the book, were depicted in such a realistic way that I finally felt someone "got it". These aspects of the characters were never addressed explicitly, but they existed solely in the social interactions between them and - most probably - in how they were perceived by readers.

I loved that the author was never prescriptive about what a reader was meant to feel. I loved the ambiguity, the foreshadowing, the hints.